by Tom Clancy
“Muy bien, jefe,” Chavez said, closing his eyes.
The British Airways 737-700 was on the ground for as little time as possible, refueled from an Air Force fuel bowser and then lifted off for Dulles International Airport outside Washington, where its presence would not cause much in the way of comment. The Rainbow troopers were bused off to a secure location and allowed to continue their rest. That worried some of them slightly. Being allowed to rest implied that rest was something they’d need soon.
Clark and Alistair Stanley conferred in a room at Joint Special Operations Command Headquarters, a nondescript building facing a small parking lot.
“So, what gives here?” asked Colonel William Byron. Called “Little Willie” by his uniformed colleagues, Colonel Byron had the most unlikely sobriquet in the United States Army. Fully six-four and two hundred thirty pounds of lean, hard meat, Byron was the largest man in JSOC. The name dated back to West Point, where he’d grown six inches and thirty pounds over four years of exercise and wholesome food, and ended up a linebacker on the Army football team that had murdered Navy 35 -10 in the autumn classic at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. His accent was still south Georgia despite his master’s degree in management from Harvard Business School, which was becoming favored in the American military.
“We’re taking a trip here,” Clark told him, passing the overheads across the table. “We need a helo and not much else.”
“Where the hell is this shithole?”
“Brazil, west of Manaus, on the Río Negro.”
“Some facility,” Byron observed, putting on the reading glasses that he hated. “Who built it, and who’s there now?”
“The people who wanted to kill the whole fucking world,” Clark responded, reaching for his cell phone when it started chirping. Again he had to wait for the encryption system to handshake with the other end. “This is Clark,” he said finally.
“Ed Foley here, John. The sample was examined by the troops up at Fort Detrick.”
“And?”
“And it’s a version of the Ebola virus, they say, modified—‘engineered’ is the term they used, as a matter of fact—by the addition of what appears to be cancer genes. They say that makes the little bastard more robust. Moreover, the virus strands were encased in some sort of mini-capsules to help it survive in the open. In other words, John, what your Russian friend told you—it looks like it’s fully confirmed.”
“What did you do with Dmitriy?” Rainbow Six asked.
“A safe house out in Winchester,” the DCI replied. It was the usual place to quarter a foreign national the CIA wanted to protect. “Oh, the FBI tells me that the Kansas State Police are looking for him on a murder charge. Supposedly he killed one Foster Hunnicutt from the state of Montana, or so he has been accused.”
“Why don’t you have the Bureau tell Kansas that he didn’t kill anybody. He was with me the whole time,” Clark suggested. They had to take care of this man, didn’t they? John had already made the conceptual leap of forgetting that Popov had instigated an attack on his wife and daughter. Business, in this case, was business, and it wasn’t the first time a KGB enemy had turned into a valuable friend.
“Okay, yes, I can do that.” It was a little white lie, Foley agreed, set against a big black truth. In his Langley, Virginia, office, Foley wondered why his hands weren’t shaking. These lunatics had not only wanted to kill the whole world, but they’d also had the ability to do so. This was a new development the CIA would have to study in detail, a whole new type of threat, and investigating it would be neither easy nor fun.
“Okay, thanks, Ed.” Clark killed the phone and looked at the others in the room. “We just confirmed the contents of the chlorine canister. They created a modified form of Ebola for distribution.”
“What?” Colonel Byron asked. Clark gave him a ten-minute explanation. “You’re serious, eh?” he asked finally.
“As a heart attack,” Clark replied. “They hired Dmitriy Popov to interface with terrorists to set up incidents throughout Europe. That was to increase the fear of terrorism, to get Global Security the consulting contract for the Australians, and—”
“Bill Henriksen?” Colonel Byron asked. “Hell, I know that guy!”
“Yeah? Well, his people were supposed to deliver the bug through the fogging-cooling system at the Olympic stadium in Sydney, Willie. Chavez was there in the control room when this Wil Gearing guy showed up with the container, and the contents were checked out by the USAMRIID guys at Fort Detrick. You know, the FBI could almost make a criminal case out of this. But not quite,” Clark added.
“So, you’re heading down there to . . .”
“To talk to them, Willie,” Clark finished the statement for him. “They have the aircraft scrubbed yet?”
Byron checked his watch. “Ought to.”
“Then it’s time for us to get moving.”
“Okay. I have BDUs for all your people, John. Sure you don’t need a little help?”
“No, Willie. I appreciate the offer, but we want to keep this one tight, don’t we?”
“I suppose, John.” Byron stood. “Follow me, guys. Those folks you’re going to see in Brazil?”
“Yeah?” Clark said.
“Give them a special hello for JSOC, will ya?”
“Yes, sir,” John promised. “We’ll do that.”
The major aircraft sitting on the Pope Air Force Base ramp was an Air Force C-5B Galaxy transport, which the local ground crew had been working on for several hours. All official markings had been painted over, with HORIZON CORPORATION painted in the place of the USAF roundels. Even the tail number was gone. The clamshell cargo doors in the rear were being sealed now. Clark and Stanley got there first. The rest of the troops arrived by bus, carrying their personal gear, and they climbed into the passenger compartment aft of the wing box. From that point on, it was just a matter of having the flight crew—dressed in civilian clothing—climb up to the flight deck and commence start-up procedures as though they were a commercial flight. A KC-10 tanker would meet up with them south of Jamaica to top off their fuel tanks.
“Okay, so that’s what seems to have happened,” John Brightling told the people assembled in the auditorium. He saw disappointment on the faces of the other fifty-two people here, but some relief was evident as well. Well, even true believers had consciences, he imagined. Too bad.
“What do we do here, John?” Steve Berg asked. He’d been one of the senior scientists on the Project, developer of the “A” and “B” vaccines, who’d also helped to design Shiva. Berg was one of the best people Horizon Corporation had ever hired.
“We study the rain forest. We have destroyed everything of evidentiary value. The Shiva supply is gone. So are the vaccines. So are all the computer records of our laboratory notes, and so forth. The only records of the Project are what you people have in your heads. In other words, if anybody tries to make a criminal case against us, you just have to keep your mouths shut, and there will be no case. Bill?” John Brightling gestured to Henriksen, who walked to the podium.
“Okay, you know that I used to be in the FBI. I know how they make their criminal cases. Making one against us will not be easy under the best of circumstances. The FBI has to play by the rules, and they’re strict rules. They must read you your rights, one of which is to have a lawyer present during questioning. All you have to say is, ‘Yes, I want my lawyer here.’ If you say that, then they can’t even ask you what the time is. Then you call us, and we get a lawyer to you, and the lawyer will tell you, right in front of the case agents, that you will not talk at all, and he’ll tell the agents that you will not talk, and that if they try to make you talk then they’ve violated all sorts of statutes and Supreme Court decisions. That means that they can get into trouble, and anything you might say cannot be used anywhere. Those are your civil protections.
“Next,” Bill Henriksen went on, “we will spend our time here looking at the rich ecosystem around us, and formulating
a cover story. That will take us some time and—”
“Wait, if we can avoid answering their questions, then—”
“Why concoct a cover story? That’s easy. Our lawyers will have to talk some with the United States attorneys. If we generate a plausible cover story, then we can make them go away. If the cops know they can’t win, they won’t fight. A good cover story will help with that. Okay, we can say that, yes, we were looking at the Ebola virus, because it’s a nasty little fucker, and the world needs a cure. Then, maybe, some loony employee decided to kill the world—but we had nothing to do with that. Why are we here? We’re here to do primary medical research into chemical compounds in the flora and fauna here in the tropical rain forest. That’s legitimate, isn’t it?” Heads nodded.
“Okay, we’ll take our time to construct an ironclad cover story. Then we’ll all memorize it. That way, when our lawyers let us talk to the FBI so that we can be cooperative, we give them only information which cannot hurt us, and will, in fact, help us evade the charges that they might hit us with. People, if we stand together and stick to our scripts, we can’t lose. Please believe me on that. We can’t lose if we use our heads. Okay?”
“And we can also work on Project 2,” Brightling said, resuming the podium. “You are some of the smartest people in the world, and our commitment to our ultimate goal has not changed. We’ll be here for a year or so. It’s a chance for us to study nature, and learn things we need to learn. It will also be a year of working to find a new way to achieve that to which we have dedicated our lives,” he went on, seeing nods. There were already alternate ideas he could investigate, probably. He was still the chairman of the world’s foremost biotech company. He still had the best and brightest people in the world working for him. He and they still cared about saving the planet. They’d just have to find something else, and they had the resources and the time to do so.
“Okay,” Brightling told them, with a beaming smile. “It’s been a long day. Let’s all bed down and get some rest. Tomorrow morning, I’m going out in the forest to see an ecosystem that we all want to learn about.”
The applause moved him. Yes, all of these people cared as much as he did, shared his dedication—and, who knew, maybe there was a way for Project 2 to happen.
Bill Henriksen came up to John and Carol during the walk to their rooms. “There is one other potential problem.”
“What’s that?”
“What if they send a paramilitary team here?”
“You mean like the Army?” Carol Brightling asked.
“That’s right.”
“We fight them,” John responded. “We have guns here, don’t we?”
And that they did. The Project Alternate armory had no fewer than a hundred German-made G-3 military assault rifles, the real sort, able to go full-automatic, and quite a few of the people here knew how to shoot.
“Yes. Okay, the problem with this is, they can’t really arrest us legally, but if they do manage to apprehend us and get us back to America, then the courts won’t care that the arrests were illegal. That’s a point of American law—once you’re in front of the judge, that’s all the judge cares about. So, if people show up, we just have to discourage them. I think—”
“I think our people won’t need much in the way of encouragement to fight back after what those bastards did to the Project!”
“I agree, but we’ll just have to see what happens. Damn, I wish we’d gotten some radar installed here.”
“Huh?” John asked.
“They will come, if they come, by helicopter. Too far to walk through the jungle, and boats are too slow, and our people think in terms of helicopters. That’s just how they do things.”
“How do they even know where we are, Bill? Hell, we skipped the country pretty fast and—”
“And they can ask the flight crews where they delivered us. They had to file flight plans to Manaus, and that narrows it down some, doesn’t it?”
“They won’t talk. They’re well paid,” John objected. “How long before they can figure all that out?”
“Oh, a couple of days at worst. Two weeks at best. I think we ought to get our people trained in defense. We can start that tomorrow,” Henriksen proposed.
“Do it,” John Brightling agreed. “And let me call home and see if anybody’s talked to our pilots.”
The master suite had its own communications room. Project Alternate was state-of-the-art in many ways, from the medical labs to communications. In the latter case the antenna farm next to the power-generating facility had its own satellite-phone system that also allowed e-mail and electronic access to Horizon Corp.’s massive internal computer network. Immediately upon arriving in his suite, Brightling flipped on the phone system and called Kansas. He left instructions for the flight crews, now most on the way back home, to inform Alternate if anyone tried to interrogate them regarding their most recent overseas trip. That done, there was little else left to do. Brightling showered and walked into the bedroom and found his wife there.
“It’s so sad,” Carol observed in the darkness.
“It’s goddamned infuriating,” John agreed. “We were so fucking close!”
“What went wrong?”
“I’m not sure, but I think our friend Popov found out what we were doing, then he killed the guy who told him about it and skipped. Somehow he told them enough to capture Wil Gearing down in Sydney. Damn, we were within hours of initiating Phase One!” he growled.
“Well, next time we’ll be more careful,” Carol soothed, reaching to stroke his arm. Failure or not, it was good to lie in bed with him again. “What about Wil?”
“He’s going to have to take his chances. I’ll get the best lawyers I can find for him,” John promised. “And get him the word to keep his mouth shut.”
Gearing had stopped talking. Somehow arriving back in America had awakened in him the idea of civil rights and criminal proceedings, and now he wasn’t saying anything to anybody. He sat in his aft-facing seat in the C-5, looking backward at the circular seal that led into the immense void area there in the tail, while these soldiers mainly dozed. Two of them were wide awake, however, and looking right at him all the way while they chatted about something or other. They were loaded for bear, Gearing saw, lots of personal weapons evident here and others loaded into the cargo area below. Where were they going? Nobody had told him that.
Clark, Chavez, and Stanley were in the compartment aft of the flight deck on the massive air-lifter. The flight crew was regular Air Force—most such transports are actually flown by reservists, mainly airline pilots in civilian life—and they kept their distance. They’d been warned by their superiors, the warnings further reinforced by the alteration in the aircraft’s exterior paint job. They were civilians now? They were dressed in civilian clothes so as to make the deception plausible to someone. But who would believe that a Lockheed Galaxy was civilian owned?
“It looks pretty straightforward,” Chavez observed. It was interesting to be an infantryman again, again a Ninja, Ding mused, again to own the night—except they were planning to go in the daylight. “Question is, will they resist?”
“If we’re lucky,” Clark responded.
“How many of them?”
“They went down in four Gulfstreams, figure a max of sixteen people each. That’s sixty-four, Domingo.”
“Weapons?”
“Would you live in the jungle without them?” Clark asked. The answer he anticipated was, not very likely.
“But are they trained?” Team-2’s commander persisted.
“Most unlikely. These people will be scientist-types, but some will know the woods, maybe some are hunters. I suppose we’ll see if Noonan’s new toys work as well as he’s been telling us.”
“I expect so,” Chavez agreed. The good news was that his people were highly trained and well equipped. Daylight or not, it would be a Ninja job. “I guess you’re in overall command?”
“You bet your sweet ass, Domin
go,” Rainbow Six replied. They stopped talking as the aircraft jolted somewhat, as they flew into the wake-turbulence of the KC-10 for aerial refueling. Clark didn’t want to watch the procedure. It had to be the most unnatural act in the world, two massive aircraft mating in midair.
Malloy was a few seats farther aft, looking at the satellite overheads as well, along with Lieutenant Harrison.
“Looks easy,” the junior officer opined.
“Yeah, pure vanilla, unless they shoot at us. Then it gets a little exciting,” he promised his copilot.
“We’re going to be close to overloading the aircraft,” Harrison warned.
“That’s why it’s got two engines, son,” the Marine pointed out.
It was dark outside. The C-5’s flight crew looked down at a surface with few lights after they’d topped off their tanks from the KC-10, but for them it was essentially an airliner flight. The autopilot knew where it was, and where it was going, with waypoints programmed in, and a thousand miles ahead the airport at Manaus, Brazil, knew they were coming, a special air-cargo flight from America which would need ramp space for a day or so, and refueling services—this information had already been faxed ahead.
It wasn’t yet dawn when they spotted the runway lights. The pilot, a young major, squirmed erect in his front-left seat and slowed the aircraft, making an easy visual approach while the first-lieutenant copilot to his right watched the instruments and called off altitude and speed numbers. Presently, he rotated the nose up and allowed the C-5B to settle onto the runway, with only a minor jolt to tell those aboard that the aircraft wasn’t flying anymore. He had a diagram of the airport, and taxied off to the far corner of the ramp, then stopped the aircraft and told the loadmaster that it was his turn to go to work.
It took a few minutes to get things organized, but then the huge rear doors opened. Then the MH-60K Night Hawk was dragged out into the predawn darkness. Sergeant Nance supervised three other enlisted men from the 160th SOAR as they extended the rotor blades from their stowed position, and climbed atop the fuselage to make sure that they were safely locked in place for flight operations. The Night Hawk was fully fueled. Nance installed the M-60 machine gun in its place on the right side and told Colonel Malloy that the aircraft was ready. Malloy and Harrison preflighted the helicopter and decided that it was ready to go, then radioed this information to Clark.