Читать книгу Extreme Instinct - Don Pendleton - Страница 8

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Just a few minutes ago, we caught another heat flash,” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman said, turning his wheelchair away from his computer workstation to pour himself a cup of coffee. “At first we thought it was a second nuke, but this wasn’t hot enough, and the chemical signature more resembled a space shuttle launch.”

“Have the Russians put something into space?” Barbara Price demanded, her stomach tightening.

Without adding milk or sugar, Kurtzman took a long draft of the steaming coffee as if it was tap water. “No, we don’t think so,” the Stony Man computer genius replied carefully, setting the mug into a recess on the armrest of his chair. “If the blast had occurred out in the open, that might have been a possibility. This actually seemed to be two simultaneous explosions exactly where the CIA believes there is a hidden tunnel.”

A tunnel? The Farm’s mission controller frowned. “Okay, something exploded inside, and the blast came out the ends,” Price rationalized, crossing her arms. “Could it have been the Red Army dealing with the thieves?”

“Or vice versa,” Carmen Delahunt announced from her console. Perched on the edge of her chair, the redhead was focused on her computer screen. Dangling from the back of her chair an S&W Bulldog revolver was tucked into an FBI-style shoulder holster.

“Explain that,” Price demanded.

“According to the NATO Watchdog satellite we hijacked, there were isotonic traces of diesel fuel in the chemical signature of the explosion,” Delahunt said. “Along with similar amounts of vulcanized rubber.”

“That sounds like a truck,” Price said slowly, testing the words.

“Three trucks, by my calculations,” Delahunt answered.

“Insulated trucks,” added Akira Tokaido, removing his earbuds. “There was far too much cobalt in the signature to come from anything other than heat-resistant steel.” Tokaido was of mixed Japanese-American ancestry. He seemed born to operate computers, code coming to him as easily as breathing to ordinary people.

“Maybe there was a tank, or an APC caught in the blast,” Price offered hesitantly.

“I wish that was true, but no,” Kurtzman countered, sliding his wheelchair under his console. “Russian military contains natural wood fibers to make the metal more elastic, and thus proof to most armor-piercing rounds.”

Wood fiber in tank armor? “Are you positive?” Price scowled.

Tokaido gave a curt nod. “The spectrum analysis is conclusive. No military vehicles were involved in the blast. So unless whatever was stolen detonated while suspended in liquid boron, or something equally outrageously exotic like that…”

“Then the explosion was caused by insulated tanker trucks carrying liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Clearly, it was a trick by the thieves to try to fake their own deaths,” Huntington Wethers said, removing an old briar pipe from his mouth. “Unfortunately, it also tells us what was stolen.”

Tall and distinguished-looking, Wethers seemed to be the epitome of a college professor with wings of silvery hair at his temples, a briar pipe and leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. Although fully tenured at Berkeley University, the man had felt a strong need to serve his country, and left the world of academia to become one of the most feared cyberhunters in existence.

Thoughtfully, Price chewed a lip. An explosion powerful enough to be mistaken for a tactical nuke, but without any radiation. The only thing that came to mind was… Oh hell, not that. “What was the last weapon tested there?” Price demanded, trying to stay calm. If what she thought had just happened, the world was in for a long hard rain of blood and pain.

“Difficult to say,” Delahunt answered. “The master computers of Mystery Mountain are not connected to the Internet, and the entire valley is covered with a camouflage net so that our Keyhole and Watchdog satellites can’t see what was happening down there.”

“However, the only logical extrapolation is that the thieves stole one of the new Russian thermobaric bombs,” Tokaido interjected.

“Now, LOX and LOH don’t quite burn as hot as one of those,” Kurtzman stated, cracking his knuckles. “But pretty damn close.”

Several decades ago, the Pentagon had started a program to create an arsenal of nonnuclear weapons, and the cream of the crop was the FAE bomb, or Fuel-Air Explosive, nicknamed Skyfire. The idea was simple, as all good ideas are. Imagine closing all of the doors and windows in a house, then turning on the gas oven but turning off the pilot. In only a few minutes, the house would be completely filled with highly explosive gas. Now stuff an ordinary fuse under the front door and light it. When the fuse reaches the interior, the house would thunderously detonate, obliterating the entire structure and quite often the homes alongside.

The FAE bomb did the same thing, but out in the open. A plane would drop the bomb and it would burst open, sending out a huge cloud of flammable gas, the exact composition of which was not known to even Stony Man. A split second later, the plummeting canister would explode, igniting the cloud, and a fiery implosion of unimaginable power would blanket the sky, uprooting forests, knocking over homes and office buildings and setting fire to everything within range. The one limiting factor was that a FAE bomb would not work if there were strong winds, or if it was raining, snowing, or even if there was heavy fog. It had to be a clear, calm day.

In spite of colossal efforts, no other nation had ever been able to duplicate the American trick of making a fuel-air explosion work. But a few months ago rumors had surfaced in the intelligence community that the Russians had not only figured out how to make an FAE but had also gone even further. They called their weapon a thermobaric bomb, and it worked exactly like an American FAE bomb, except it could function in high winds, rain, snow or fog. There were no operational limitations on a T-bomb, and if true, it was the most deadly weapon in existence. For all intents and purposes, it was a nuclear bomb that did not give off hard radiation—a clean nuke.

“Is there anything in space?” Price asked, walking closer to the wall screens, her hands clenched into tight fists. “Have the Russians created a new…I don’t know, some sort of a new plasma weapon and it’s running wild?”

“Space is clear,” Delahunt intoned.

Damn. “Do we have any video from the valley? Security cameras or such?”

“Not after a nuclear explosion,” Kurtzman scoffed, drinking from the old cracked mug. “The EMP blast of the nuke erased all of the electronic records.”

Which was probably deliberately done by the thieves, Price realized dourly. It would be very hard for the FSB to track down the thieves if they knew absolutely nothing about them. The nuke destroyed the base, along with any video, then the tanker trucks in the tunnel faked the death of the thieves and vaporized any physical evidence. Whoever took the weapon was smart. Too damn smart, in her opinion.

Deep in thought, Price started to pace. Personally, she hoped that China had stolen the damn thing. At least with them, the United Nations could exert political and economic pressure to not use the weapon. If a terrorist group got their hands on a T-bomb they would immediately use it to destroy a major city—New York, London, Tokyo. The death toll would be in the millions.

“Okay, if somebody has stolen a T-bomb, then how do we track the thing?” Price demanded. “There must be remote telemetry or a lowjack on the thing.”

“Which anybody with an EM scanner could find and remove,” Tokaido stated, studying the monitor on his console. The screen was flashing through road maps of the Russian countryside. A flatbed had been seen by a NATO spy satellite amid the wreckage left by the tidal wave from the destroyed dam. If the bomb was particularly heavy, then it could only be hauled over specific roads. Unfortunately, most of the logging roads in the mountains connected with railroads, and those went everywhere in Russia.

Grudgingly, Price accepted that. “Okay, what about dogs or chemical sensors?” She rallied. “We can tune every one at every major airport to look for just T-bombs.”

“Sorry, no can do,” Kurtzman stated bluntly, placing aside his empty mug. “Hell, Barb, we don’t even know what the damn thing looks like, much less how it works.”

Chewing a lip, Price tried to find some way to approach the problem, but was coming up with nothing. The Russian superweapon was practically invisible. Nobody would know it had been smuggled into Washington until the Pentagon vanished in a fiery implosion that also ripped the White House from its very foundation.

“Okay, do we know of any operational limitations?” she demanded.

“Unfortunately, no,” Wethers muttered around his pipe. Smoking was forbidden anywhere near the supercomputer, but the man found chewing on the stem oddly inducive to his creative concentration. “The Pentagon strongly believes that the T-bomb can be activated at extreme low levels, perhaps as little as five hundred feet.”

Price stared hard at the professor. “Are you trying to tell me that it may not be necessary to drop the T-bomb from a plane?” she said slowly, absorbing the information. “Instead it could simply be rolled off the roof of a fifty-story building?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“But no nation in the world can secure every office building over fifty stories tall. There must be hundreds, thousands, of them.”

Deep in thought, Price poured herself a mug of coffee, adding a great deal of sugar and milk. Kurtzman liked the stuff strong enough to degrease tractor parts, but lesser humans preferred it at less lethal levels of corrosion.

Taking small sips, the woman finished the mug, then turned around with a new light in her eyes. “All right,” she said forcibly. “If we can’t track the weapon, then we go after the thieves.”

“But we don’t know who took it,” Kurtzman tactfully reminded her.

Impatiently, Price waved the objection aside. “That doesn’t matter. We know that they used a Chinese nuke. Start there. Send Phoenix Force to Milan to see if somebody purchased a black-market nuke recently. After that, they can try Paris and then Sudan. This whole thing might have been a trick by Russia for an excuse to attack their ancient enemy, China.”

“You think the Kremlin nuked Mystery Mountain just to have a legitimate excuse to start a nuclear war?” Tokaido asked in disbelief, then frowned. It wouldn’t be a nuclear war, but a Skyfire war. “On it,” he announced, and bent over the console, his hands flying across the keyboard.

“The big question is, how did the thieves know about the test?” Kurtzman growled. “It wasn’t exactly broadcast on the evening news.”

“Which leaves two possibilities,” Price continued. “Either there is a traitor, or somebody hacked into the computer system at Mystery Mountain.”

“Not even we can do that,” Delahunt stated in annoyance, curling her toes on the floor. “Their firewalls are just as good as those at the White House.”

Kurtzman snorted. “So it’s got to be a traitor.”

“Or a spy,” Price amended. “Carmen, check the first-class-passenger list at every major airport in the area, cross reference that to the personnel file we stole from the Kremlin last month. Find me somebody who went on vacation the day before the T-bomb was stolen.”

“I’ll also check with the health department to see if anybody recently got sick. Vacations can be cancelled by your boss, but nobody would interfere with a cancer treatment,” Delahunt muttered.

Clenching her gloves, she closed the files she had been reading and activated the NSA communication protocols.

“Okay, if Russia and China were not behind the theft, this might have been done by mercenaries hired to do the bloody work,” Price speculated. “Hunt, activate the Dirty Dozen, try to hire the top mercs and see who is not available.”

“Already doing it, Barb,” the professor muttered around his pipe.

Long ago, Mack Bolan had suggested the creation of some artificial buyers of weapon. In virtual reality, that was easy. But Kurtzman had decided to take the matter one step further. Together with his team, the Farm had created a dozen fake personalities in all of the major areas of crime, along with a team of black ops mercs called Blue Lightning.

The Dirty Dozen was a collection of artificial criminals invented by Kurtzman and his team long ago. Their entire lives were fake, forged out of nothing but the Stony Man hackers slipping data into files around the world. When a bank was robbed in Melbourne, the hackers started the rumors that it was financed by one of the Dozen. If a politician got assassinated in Norway, it was because he had crossed the path of another of the Dirty Dozen. Pirates attacked a cruise ship in the Caribbean, an Interpol agent was shot in Amsterdam, a plane crashed in the Andes—any unsolved crime was quickly attributed to these secretive masters of criminal underworld.

The names of the Dozen were constantly changed as they died in car accidents or were captured and executed—only to be immediately replaced by another Stony Man construct. The Dirty Dozen was a constant source of valuable information about international crime as people tried to sell them stolen goods. And whenever one of the Stony Man field teams needed to contact a terrorist group, a member of the Dirty Dozen was always available to vouch for them through e-mail or a phone call.

“Hunt, keep a watch for any secret arms sales,” Kurtzman added. “If the T-bomb becomes available for sale, it is a safe bet that one of the Dozen will be invited to the auction. If so, pay any price to get it. Better to pay a billion dollars now than a hundred billion to rebuild Los Angeles.”

“Agreed,” the professor muttered, his hands busy. “However, it could be more than a billion.”

“Don’t care. Pay whatever is necessary. I’ll have our Keyhole and Watchdog satellites initiate a planetary recon for any other gigantic explosions,” Kurtzman declared brusquely. “The thieves may try to fake their own deaths again. Or worse, actually use the T-bomb on somebody.”

“God forbid,” Price muttered softly, glancing at the clock on the wall.

“Hold on…okay, I found him,” Delahunt announced. “A janitor working at Mystery Mountain recently won a free vacation in an online contest and had to leave the day before the theft occurred or else he lost the prize.”

A contest win, that was a good cover. She had used something similar once herself. “What’s the name, and where did he go?”

“Stanislav Kominsky. Disney World, Orlando, Florida.”

“The other side of the world,” Kurtzman muttered. “Not very subtle.”

“Okay, try this,” Delahunt said. “He was killed in a car crash en route to his hotel room on the day he arrived. The body was taken to the Dade County morgue, and since Mr. Kominsky is Jewish, he had to be buried within twenty-four hours.” She paused. “He was interred at Bonaventure Acres roughly six hours ago.”

“Less than an hour before the theft took place.”

“Yep.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.” Kurtzman’s hands flew across the controls of his console with expert speed. “I’ll have Jack Grimaldi warm up a C-130 Hercules, and Able Team can be there in a few hours to check the body.”

“Why not have the local police or a CSI team do it?” Tokaido asked, tentatively glancing sideways.

“Because, with any luck, it could be a trap,” Price stated with a humorless smile.