by Tom Clancy
“True,” Sullivan conceded.
“We might have to try something else.”
“What might that be?”
“I’m not sure,” Clark admitted.
The videotaping was done in the Project’s media center, where they’d hoped to produce nature tapes for those who survived the plague. The end of the Project as an operational entity hit its members hard. Kirk Maclean was especially downcast, but he acted his role well in explaining the morning rides that he, Serov, Hunnicutt, and Killgore had enjoyed. Then Dr. John Killgore told of how he’d found the horses, and then came Maclean’s explanation of how the body was found, and the autopsy Killgore had personally performed, which had found the .44 bullet that had ended Foster Hunnicutt’s life. With that done, the men joined the others in the lobby of the residence building, and a minibus ferried them to the waiting aircraft.
It would be a 3,500-mile flight to Manaus, they were told on boarding, about eight hours, an easy hop for the Gulfstream V. The lead aircraft was nearly empty, just the doctors Brightling, Bill Henriksen, and Steve Berg, lead scientist for the Shiva part of the Project. The aircraft lifted off at nine in the morning local time. Next stop, the Amazon Valley of central Brazil.
It turned out that the FBI did know where the Kansas site was. A car and two agents from the local resident agency drove out in time to see the jets lift off, which they duly reported to their base station, and from there to Washington. Then they just parked at the side of the road, sipped at their drinks, ate their McDonald’s burgers and watched nothing happening at all at the misplaced buildings in the middle of wheat country.
The C-17 switched crews at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, then refueled and lifted off for Travis in northern California. Chavez and his party never even departed the aircraft, but watched the new crew arrive with box lunches and drinks, and then settled in for the next six hours of air travel. Wilson Gearing was trying to explain himself now, talking about trees and birds and fish and stuff, Ding overheard. It was not an argument calculated to persuade the father of a newborn, and the husband of a physician, but the man rambled on. Noonan listened politely and recorded this conversation, too.
The flight south was quiet on all the aircraft. Those who hadn’t heard about the developments in Sydney guessed that something was wrong, but they couldn’t communicate with the lead aircraft without going through the flight crews, and they had not been briefed in on the Project’s objectives—like so many of the employees of Horizon Corporation, they had simply been paid to do the jobs for which they were trained. They flew now on a southerly course to a destination just below the equator. It was a trip they’d made before, when Project Alternate had been built the previous year. It, too, had its own runway sufficient for the business jets, but only VFR daylight capable, since it lacked the navigation aids in Kansas. If anything went wrong, they would bingo to the Manaus city airport, ninety-eight miles to the east of their destination, which had full services, including repairs. Project Alternate had spare parts, and every aircraft had a trained mechanic aboard, but they preferred to leave major repairs to others. In an hour, they were “feet-wet” over the Gulf of Mexico, then turned east to fly through the international travel corridor over Cuba. The weather forecast was good all the way down to Venezuela, where they might have to dodge a few thunderheads, but nothing serious. The senior passengers in the lead aircraft figured that they were leaving the country about as fast as it could be done, disappearing off the face of the planet they’d hoped to save.
“What’s that?” Sullivan asked. Then he turned. “Four jets just left the Kansas location, and they headed off to the south.”
“Is there any way to track them?”
Sullivan shrugged. “The Air Force maybe.”
“How the hell do we do that?” Clark wondered aloud. Then he called Langley.
“I can try, John, but getting the Air Force hopping this quick won’t be easy.”
“Try, will you, Ed? Four Gulfstream-type business jets heading south from central Kansas, destination unknown.”
“Okay, I’ll call the NMCC.”
That was not a difficult thing for the Director of Central Intelligence to do. The senior duty officer in the National Military Command Center was an Air Force two-star recently rotated into a desk job after commanding the remaining USAF fighter force in NATO.
“So, what are we supposed to do, sir?” the general asked.
“Four Gulfstream-type business jets took off from central Kansas about half an hour ago. We want them tracked.”
“With what? All our air-defense fighters are on the Canadian border. Calling them down wouldn’t work, they’d never catch up.”
“How about an AWACS?” Foley asked.
“They belong to Air Combat Command at Langley—ours, not yours—and well, maybe one’s up for counter-drug surveillance or maybe training. I can check.”
“Do that,” Ed Foley said. “I’ll hold.”
The two-star in blue went one better than that, calling the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, which had radar coverage over the entire country, and ordering them to identify the four Gs. That took less than a minute, and a computer command was sent to the Federal Aviation Administration to check the flight plans that had to be filed for international flights. NORAD also told the general that there were two E-3B AWACS aircraft aloft at the moment, one 300 miles south of New Orleans doing counter-drug operations, and the other just south of Eglin Air Force Base, conducting routine training with some fighters based there in an exercise against a Navy flight out of Pensacola Naval Air Station. With that information, he called Langley Air Force Base in the Virginia Tidewater, got Operations, and told them about the DCI’s request.
“What’s this for, sir?” the general asked Foley, once the phone lines were properly lashed up.
“I can’t tell you that, but it’s important as hell.”
The general relayed that to Langley Operations, but did not relay the snarled response back to CIA. This one had to be kicked to the four-star who ran Air Combat Command, who, conveniently, was in his office rather than the F-16 that came with the job. The four-star grunted approval, figuring CIA wouldn’t ask without good reason.
“You can have it if you need it. How far will it be going?”
“I don’t know. How far can one of those Gulfstream jets go?”
“Hell, sir, the new one, the G-V, can fly all the way to friggin’ Japan. I may have to set up some tanker support.”
“Okay, please do what you have to do. Who do I call to keep track of the shadowing operation?”
“NORAD.” He gave the DCI the number to call.
“Okay, thank you, General. The Agency owes you one.”
“I will remember that, Director Foley,” the USAF major general promised.
“We’re in luck,” Clark heard. “The Air Force is chopping an AWACS to us. We can follow them all the way to where they’re going,” Ed Foley said, exaggerating somewhat, since he didn’t understand the AWACS would have to refuel on the way.
The aircraft in question, a ten-year-old E-3B Sentry, got the word fifteen minutes later. The pilot relayed the information to the senior control officer aboard, a major, who in turn called NORAD for further information and got it ten minutes after the leading G departed U.S. airspace. The steer from Cheyenne Mountain made the tracking exercise about as difficult as the drive to the local 7-Eleven. A tanker would meet them over the Caribbean, after lifting off from Panama, and what had been an interesting air-defense exercise reverted to total boredom. The E-3B Sentry, based on the venerable Boeing 707- 320B, flew at the identical speed as the business jets made in Savannah, and kept station from fifty miles behind. Only the aerial tanking would interfere with matters, and that not very much. The radar aircraft’s call-sign was Eagle Two-Niner, and it had satellite radio capability to relay everything, including its radar picture, to NORAD in Colorado. Most of Eagle Two-Niner’s crewmen rested in their c
omfortable seats, many of them dozing off while three controllers worked the four Gulfstreams they were supposed to track. It was soon evident that they were heading somewhere pretty straight, five minutes or about forty-one miles apart, attempting no deception at all, not even wavetop flying. But that, they knew, would only abuse the airframes and use up gas unnecessarily. It didn’t matter to the surveillance aircraft, which could spot a trash bag floating in the water—something they regularly did in counter-drug operations, since that was one of the methods used by smugglers to transfer their cocaine—or even enforce the speed limit on interstate highways, since anything going faster than eighty miles per hour was automatically tracked by the radar-computer system, until the operator told the computer to ignore it. But now all they had to look at were commercial airliners going and coming in routine daily traffic, plus the four Gulfstreams, who were traveling so normal, straight, and dumb that, as one controller observed, even a Marine could have taken them out without much in the way of guidance.
By this time, Clark was on a shuttle flight to Reagan National Airport across the river from Washington. It landed on time, and Clark was met by a CIA employee whose “company” car was parked outside for the twenty-minute ride to Langley and the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building. Dmitriy Popov had never expected to be inside this particular edifice, even wearing a VISITOR—ESCORT REQUIRED badge. John handled the introductions.
“Welcome,” Foley said in his best Russian. “I imagine you’ve never been here before.”
“As you have never been to Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square.”
“Ah, but I have,” Clark responded. “Right into Sergey Nikolay’ch’s office, in fact.”
“Amazing,” Popov responded, sitting down as guided.
“Okay, Ed, where the hell are they now?”
“Over northern Venezuela, heading south, probably for central Brazil. The FAA tells us that they filed a flight plan—it’s required by law—for Manaus. Rubber-tree country, I think. A couple of rivers come together there.”
“They told me that there is a facility there, like the one in Kansas, but smaller,” Popov informed his hosts.
“Task a satellite to it?” Clark asked the DCI.
“Once we know where it is, sure. The AWACS lost a little ground when it refueled, but it’s only a hundred fifty miles back now, and that’s not a problem. They say the four business jets are just flying normally, cruising right along.”
“Once we know where they’re going . . . then what?”
“Not sure,” Foley admitted. “I haven’t thought it through that far.”
“There might not be a good criminal case on this one, Ed.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Clark confirmed with a nod. “If they’re smart, and we have to assume they are, they can destroy all the physical evidence of the crime pretty easily. That leaves witnesses, but who, you suppose, is aboard those four Gs heading into Brazil?”
“All the people who know what’s been happening. You’d want to keep that number low for security reasons, wouldn’t you—so, you think they’re going down there for choir practice?”
“What?” Popov asked.
“They need to find and learn a single story to tell the FBI when the interrogations begin,” Foley explained. “So, they all need to learn the same hymn, and learn to sing it the same way every time.”
“What would you do in their place, Ed?” Rainbow Six asked reasonably.
Foley nodded. “Yeah, that’s about it. Okay, what should we do?”
Clark looked the DCI straight in the eye. “Pay them a little visit, maybe?”
“Who authorizes that?” the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
“I still draw my paychecks from this agency. I report to you, Ed, remember?”
“Christ, John.”
“Do I have your permission to get my people together at a suitable staging point?”
“Where?”
“Fort Bragg, I suppose,” Clark proposed. Foley had to yield to the logic of the moment.
“Permission granted.” And with that Clark walked down the narrow office to a table with a secure phone to call Hereford.
Alistair Stanley had bounced back well from his wounds, enough so that he could just about manage a full day in his office without collapsing with exhaustion. Clark’s trip to the States had left him in charge of a crippled Rainbow force, and he was facing problems now that Clark had not yet addressed, like replacements for the two dead troopers. Morale was brittle at the moment. There were still two missing people with whom the survivors had worked intimately, and that was never an easy thing for men to bear, though every morning they were out on the athletic field doing their daily routine, and every afternoon they fired their weapons to stay current and ready for a possible call-up. This was regarded as unlikely, but, then, none of the missions that Rainbow had carried out had been, in retrospect, very likely. His secure phone started chirping, and Stanley reached to answer it.
“Yes, this is Alistair Stanley.”
“Hi, Al, this is John. I’m in Langley now.”
“What the bloody hell’s been happening, John? Chavez and his people have fallen off the earth, and—”
“Ding and his people are halfway between Hawaii and California now, Al. They arrested a major conspirator in Sydney.”
“Very well, what the devil’s been going on?”
“You sitting down, Al?”
“Yes, John, of course I am, and—”
“Listen up. I’ll give you the short version,” Clark commanded, and proceeded to do that for the next ten minutes.
“Bloody hell,” Stanley said when his boss stopped talking. “You’re sure of this?”
“Damned sure, Al. We are now tracking the conspirators in four aircraft. They seem to be heading for central Brazil. Okay, I need you to get all the people together and fly them to Fort Bragg—Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina—with all their gear. Everything, Al. We may be taking a trip down to the jungle to . . . to, uh, deal decisively with these people.”
“Understood. I’ll try to get things organized here. Maximum speed?”
“That is correct. Tell British Airways we need an airplane,” Clark went on.
“Very well, John. Let me get moving here.”
In Langley, Clark wondered what would happen next, but before he could decide that he needed to get all of his assets in place. Okay, Alistair would try to get British Airways to release a spare, reserve aircraft to his people for a direct flight to Pope, and from there—from there he’d have to think some more. And he’d have to get there, too, to Special Operations Command with Colonel Little Willie Byron.
“Target One is descending,” a control officer reported over the aircraft’s intercom. The senior controller looked up from the book he was reading, activated his scope, and confirmed the information. He was breaking international law at the moment. Eagle Two-Niner hadn’t gotten permission to overfly Brazil, but the air-traffic-control radar systems down there read his transponder signal as a civilian air-cargo flight—the usual ruse—and nobody had challenged them yet. Confirming that information, he got on his satellite radio to report this information to NORAD and, though he didn’t know it, on to CIA. Five minutes later, Target Two started doing the same. Also both aircraft were slowing, allowing Eagle Two-Niner to catch up somewhat. The senior controller told the flight crew to continue on this heading and speed, inquired about fuel state, and learned that they had another eight hours of flight time, more than enough to return to their home at Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City.
In England, the British Airways card was played, and the airline, after ten minutes of checking, assigned Rainbow a 737-700 airliner, which would await their pleasure at Luton, a small commercial airport north of London. They’d have to go there by truck, and those were whistled up from the British army’s transport company at Hereford.
It looked like a green sea, John Brightling thought, the top layer of
the triple-canopy jungle. In the setting sun, he could see the silvery paths of rivers, but almost nothing of the ground itself. This was the richest ecosystem on the planet, and one that he’d never studied in detail—well, Brightling thought, now he’d be able to, for the next year or so. Project Alternate was a robust and comfortable facility with a maintenance staff of six people, its own power supply, satellite communications, and ample food. He wondered which of the people on the four aircraft might be good cooks. There would be a division of labor here, as at every other Project activity, with himself, of course, as the leader.
At Binghamton, New York, the maintenance staff was loading a bunch of biohazard-marked containers into the incinerator. It was sure a big furnace, one of the men thought—big enough to cremate a couple of bodies at the same time—and, judging by the thickness of the insulation, a damned hot one. He pulled down the three-inch-thick door, locked it in place, and punched the ignition button. He could hear the gas jetting it and lighting off from the sparkler-things inside, followed by the usual voosh. There was nothing unusual about this. Horizon Corporation was always disposing of biological material of one sort or another. Maybe it was live AIDS virus, he thought. The company did a lot of work in that area, he’d read. But for the moment he looked at the papers on his clipboard. Three sheets of paper from the special order that had been faxed in from Kansas, and every line was checked off. All the containers specified were now ashes. Hell, this incinerator even destroyed the metal lids. And up into the sky went the only physical evidence of the Project. The maintenance worker didn’t know that. To him container G7-89-98-00A was just a plastic container. He didn’t even know that there was a word such as Shiva. As required, he went to his desktop computer—everyone here had one—and typed in that he’d eliminated the items on the work order. This information went into Horizon Corporation’s internal network, and, though he didn’t know it, popped onto a screen in Kansas. There were special instructions with that, and the technician lifted his phone to relay the information to another worker, who relayed it in turn to the phone number identified on the electronically posted notice.