Blackout

by Nance, John J. ;

  “What are you talking about?” Kat asked in alarm.

  “I wrote fifty pages of details and … names and documents, Schoen,” Jordan began, and stopped to cough and gasp for breath, “… as soon as I realized you were trying to kill Katherine.”

  “If you did”—Schoen shrugged—“we’ll find it.”

  “Impossible. You’ll never be able to stop it.”

  “Well,” Schoen replied, “I suppose we’ll just have to take that chance.”

  “Or … you can let all of us live,” Jordan continued, “knowing that we’ll all keep quiet because you’re still out there.”

  Arlin Schoen sighed and turned away, sidestepping a growing pool of gasoline under the wing. He laughed sarcastically. “I’m beginning to see why you’ve lasted so long in Washington, old man.” He turned back to Jordan. “Okay. Let’s see. I refrain from blowing your head off and you won’t talk because you go to jail if you do. I let MacCabe walk, and he’s going to refrain from blowing the cork on this because you asked him to? Give me a break. He’d have his super-liberal, Pentagon-hating national desk on the line in ten minutes and spill his guts. But how about this, James? I kill the rest of them, spare you, and you still have to keep quiet because you’re guilty as sin. In fact, let’s have some fun with this. You seem very fond of Miss Bronsky, there, so what if we start dismembering that cute little blond piece of ass in front of you? How far would I have to go before you’d tell me just where you hid such a document? Rape her in front of you? Cut off her breasts? Shoot her in the spine?” He glowered at Kat. “Nice hairdo, Bronsky. Had me fooled in Portland.”

  “If you’ve killed the others,” Kat said quickly, “where were they? Where did I hide them? I think you’re bluffing.”

  Thomas Maverick and Robert MacCabe had both been working to stem Jordan James’s bleeding. Ignoring Kat’s question, Arlin Schoen looked at them derisively and turned to walk back under the wing, gesturing for his men to join him. When they reached him, Schoen swung around and fastened his eyes on Jordan.

  “No, I think you’re lying, James. And it’s a real shame you and these three were all killed in a plane crash in Idaho and burned beyond recognition. “Fire on my command. READY.”

  “This is a fatal mistake, Schoen,” Jordan said, his voice raspy.

  “Fatal for you, of course,” Schoen replied. “AIM.”

  The gunmen drew a bead on the four of them. In her peripheral vision, Kat saw Robert’s right arm moving up.

  “By the way, Bronsky,” Schoen added, “the name of the place is Stehekin.”

  Kat felt her insides run cold. She opened her mouth to protest when a loud pop sizzled away from Robert’s direction and the phosphorescent streak of an emergency flare shot forward into the pool of fuel beneath the wing, igniting it instantly.

  A wall of searing gasoline-fed flames erupted between the gunmen and their targets, surrounding them in seconds. The gunman on the right of Schoen let out a hysterical yelp as the flames ignited his pants. He stepped backward and tripped into a pool of burning gasoline, screaming for help as his body exploded in flames.

  Robert scooped James off the ground in one fluid motion and yelled to Kat and Thomas Maverick to follow as he raced for the safety of a grove of trees.

  Arlin Schoen heard his man’s scream and ignored it. He lunged for a small pathway along the fuselage not yet engulfed in fire, with his other gunman right behind him. Before they could reach safety, the trigger finger of the burning gunman involuntarily tightened, and a fusillade of bullets ripped through the fuel tank above.

  The monstrous explosion fragmented the wing, the fuselage, Arlin Schoen, and the remaining gunman, spraying flaming shrapnel in all directions. Some of it whizzed harmlessly over the hollow Robert had found, followed by the staccato sounds of large shards of sheet metal and other assorted parts clanging and clunking their way back to earth. The stench of burned hydrocarbons stained the air.

  It seemed like minutes had passed before Kat dared to look. What had been the broken fuselage of an Albatross was now a hulk of burning, smoking wreckage indistinguishable as an aircraft. Through the flames and smoke she could see the Caravan sitting undamaged at the water’s edge, its cabin empty.

  “Robert?” she called out.

  “Right here,” he answered slowly.

  “What was that? What happened?”

  “I found a signal flare pen in the … first-aid kit. Looks like a fountain pen. It was all I could think of.”

  “It was brilliant,” she said.

  “Agent Bronsky?” Thomas Maverick raised up from where he’d been examining Jordan James. “The bleeding isn’t slowing.”

  Jordan’s eyes were open as he clutched his chest and tried to clear his throat. Kat moved to him, feeling helpless. “Don’t try to talk, Uncle Jordan.”

  James shook his head. “No! I must … tell you this. Is he dead? Schoen?”

  She nodded.

  He nodded in return. “Good. He and Gallagher were crazy. They … they decided there was no price too great to pay to protect the project.”

  “The project?”

  “Yes. Project Brilliant Lance. Lasers designed to blind and kill. Deep black project. I invested my life savings in Signet Electrosystems, Kat. When I left CIA, I thought … it was the last assignment. I … thought they were a good company, and they had this … this incredible fast-track black-project … contract. It was supposed to be the greatest defense coup yet.”

  “Before the nephew of the White House chief of staff lost his eyes?”

  Jordan nodded, coughing and wincing. “I was on the board. No one formally told me the … development was … continuing off the books. But I knew it. The arrogance of … an old intelligence hand. ‘We know better than … this stupid President.’”

  “Then the weapons were stolen?” Kat asked.

  He shook his head, looking at Robert and Thomas Maverick, both of whom were kneeling beside him. “There was no theft. I just let you … follow that … conclusion.”

  “And … no leak in the FBI?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Who is Gallagher?” Kat asked.

  “Signet’s CEO,” he replied.

  She looked at him in silence for a few seconds. “Schoen mentioned a botched test firing, Jordan. Was the SeaAir crash an accident?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They were … doing another … secret test series with an even more powerful version, and someone in … a C-one-forty-one from … Wright-Patterson got trigger-happy and fired … at the wrong radar target.”

  “So, the Air Force—”

  “Not involved directly. We had the power … to order everything sealed.” He stopped and gasped for breath a few times. “They pulled the test dummy from the F-one-oh-six later … that day, expecting a normal test hit. They knew about SeaAir, but no one … on the test team had any suspicion at all they … might have been involved, let alone responsible. But they looked at … the dummy, and there was no laser hit, even though the cameras showed one. They enlarged the video image … of what the laser had hit, and … two commercial pilots came up, sitting in the crosshairs a microsecond before the laser destroyed their eyes and probably killed them instantly.” He looked at Robert. “This is an incredibly … powerful weapon to be shoulder-fired. It’s … it’s a fearsome thing. I’ve always worried … one could fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Such as a terrorist?” Robert prompted.

  Jordan nodded.

  “But there is no terrorist organization, is there, Mr. Secretary?”

  Jordan James looked up at Robert. “Oh, yes, there is. Signet Electrosystems. We … became efficient terrorists, even inventing our own name, Nuremberg.”

  “Schoen’s idea?” Kat asked.

  Jordan nodded with great difficulty and gasped for breath before continuing. “Under the leadership, if … you can call it that, of our … CEO … Larry Gallagher.”

  “Mr. Secretary,” Robert MacCabe said quietly, �
�are you saying that Schoen did all the rest of this, the Meridian seven-forty-seven, the airport shutdowns, the Chicago crash, just to cover up that accident?”

  Jordan closed his eyes for a second and appeared to drift off, then came to. “I … didn’t know what he was doing. I only knew from a phone call to him that something was about to happen … as a diversion. I tried … dear God, I really tried to stop them.” He closed his eyes and panted for breath, forcing himself to stay conscious. “Gallagher … wouldn’t listen. Schoen … wouldn’t. I … suspected Australia or Hong Kong, or even Tokyo, which … is why I had you pulled off that flight, Kat. I knew he was crazy by then. I just didn’t … I … I wanted … you not flying … a few days. Didn’t know …”

  He drifted off. Kat could see the pool of blood growing beneath him.

  “He’s bleeding out, Kat, and there’s nothing we can do,” Robert said.

  Jordan opened his eyes again, fixing his gaze on Kat’s tear-streaked face. She was sobbing silently as she watched his eyes flutter open again.

  “I’m so sorry, Kat. I’ve destroyed your faith … and fifty years … of government service. I just … didn’t know what to do. I’d gone from … six hundred thousand net worth to twenty million … all in stock, and it would all be gone. But … if they had time to clean this up … I thought … thought …” He coughed violently and recovered. “I … was too busy being rich and sage. Even had a school … named for me.”

  “Who was Schoen, Jordan?” Kat asked softly.

  “Former … East German. Defected in the sixties … then CIA. Rewarded for service to the U.S. with a … naturalized citizenship. I hired him at Langley.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jordan,” Kat said. Tears flowed down her cheeks, but he had already drifted into a coma.

  She sat with him for nearly a half hour as his life ebbed away. A Medivac helicopter summoned by satellite phone sat down nearby at last, but too late.

  Kat stood shakily as Thomas Maverick climbed into the helicopter that would carry Jordan’s body back to Hailey, Idaho. “Robert, we’ve got to get to Stehekin,” she said.

  “You think there’s any chance he was bluffing?” Robert asked.

  She took a deep, ragged breath and looked at him, shaking her head no. “There’s no way he could have guessed the name Stehekin if they hadn’t found them. I’d like to hope they haven’t reached them yet, but I know better. At any rate, we have to find out. And I can handle a Caravan.”

  With an in-flight phone call, a park ranger was waiting at the dock with a car when they tied up at Stehekin. They jumped in and roared toward the cabin.

  There was a wisp of steam coming from the roof vent, but no smoke from the chimney as they approached the front door. The ranger briefed them on the false alarm the day before. “A local had spotted the front door open with no one around. I checked things out, glanced around inside, noted the remains of a hummingbird feeder and its spilled red syrup on the porch, and then reclosed the door. Everything seemed okay to me.”

  Kat tried the door and found it unlocked. She held her gun at the ready as she opened the latch and swung it inward, greeted instantly by the familiar heavy sweet aroma of burned firewood. It was stale, as if the fire had been out for some time.

  “Stay here,” she told Robert and the ranger, but Robert stepped inside and stopped, leaving the ranger on the porch.

  The door to one of the bedrooms was open. Kat strained to see inside as she moved carefully, calling their names and hearing nothing. “Dallas? Graham?”

  The creaking of a floorboard ran cold chills up her spine, but she forced herself to keep moving.

  “Anyone here? Steve? Dan?”

  There were feet visible through the bedroom door, one pair at the end of a bunk, and an arm hanging lifelessly toward the floor from the side of the bed. Kat felt her heart sink as she moved in that direction, knowing instinctively what she was about to find. They were too late. Schoen had found them after all.

  “Who’re you, Darlin’?”

  Kat whirled around to see the source of the familiar throaty voice, her mind in confusion. Dallas Nielson was standing on the porch, a load of firewood in her arms, questioning the young ranger, as Robert raced back out through the door to grab her in a big hug.

  “Whoa! Robert! Robert, my man!” Dallas yelped, hugging him back.

  Kat glanced back at the bedroom in confusion. The feet and arm were gone, and in their place a sleepy Steve Delaney was standing in the door, blinking at her as Graham Tash and Dan Wade followed. “Kat?”

  She felt the tears welling up and struggled to control them, but it was no use.

  EPILOGUE

  The managing editor’s secretary leaned into his office and pointed at his computer screen. “MacCabe’s teaser is in. He says to tell you he likes the idea of a six-part run for the story, he’s ready with final copy for the copyright, and he says to tell you he’s been asked to do Face the Nation and Meet the Press on Sunday as the first installment kicks off, and wants to know which one you’d recommend.”

  “Face the Nation. I’ve always loved Leslie Stahl.”

  “Leslie’s not doing that show anymore.”

  “In her honor, then. CBS needs the help.”

  The editor turned to his terminal and called up the copy Robert MacCabe had written for a teaser introducing a series that everyone expected would put him in the running for another Pulitzer.

  THE ANATOMY OF A TOP SECRET DISASTER

  Somewhere along the way,

  Project Brilliant Lance became a monster worthy

  of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  Washington, D.C.—Amid a firestorm of public outrage this week stemming from the Signet Electrosystems scandal, the President announced yesterday that he is making virtually everyone in his administration available, including himself, in the growing investigation of how a United States “black” defense project could metastasize into a terrorist group. “Nuremberg,” as the security force-cum-pseudoterrorist organization called itself, ultimately caused the deaths of hundreds of airline passengers in two separate crashes (an airline accident in Chicago around the same time was found to be unrelated). The revelation that Nuremberg was the creation of the security forces protecting a black project called Brilliant Lance has triggered the resignation of the Secretary of Defense, who technically controlled such projects; the resignation of the director of Central Intelligence, whose agency may have unwittingly protected the effort; and the discovery that over $2 billion of taxpayer funds were spent in the past four years to sustain a project specifically prohibited by executive order.

  While it will take months, if not years, to sort out the full extent of this seismic scandal, much is known already, including the background of Project Brilliant Lance, up through the terrifying flight and subsequent crash of Meridian Flight 5 in the jungles of Vietnam, an atrocity that killed over two hundred passengers, but somehow spared this reporter’s life.

  This six-part series (starting in Sunday’s edition) comprises reporting both from a personal, participatory point of view, and an overview of the anatomy of an American crisis—a crisis now propelling a further erosion of confidence in government.

  The fact that Americans could be murdered, an entire industry imperiled, and the ability of the U.S. to respond to genuine terrorist threats seriously undermined is compounded by the fact that many of those involved—and now indicted—apparently believed they were serving the best interests of their country.

  In this case, the alleged criminality of those trying to protect Project Brilliant Lance led to the deaths of innocent civilians, dedicated FBI agents, and a beloved figure in American government, perpetual statesman Jordan James (acting Secretary of State at the time he was killed). But these are merely the black-ink statistics in a crisis whose details begin with a single, horrific idea: A military adversary whose eyes have been destroyed cannot fight effectively. That premise, and the horrors it could spawn in future wars, are earning the U.S.
cynical condemnation internationally from many countries frantically working on similar capabilities.

  How it started, what happened, and where it will lead are the sinews of a tragic story of murderous misconduct veiled in official secrecy—a story every American needs to know, lest it happen again.

  (Robert MacCabe’s exclusive six-part series begins on Sunday.)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The history of this work would fill a book in itself, and there are far too many people across the miles to thank, including a cadre of law enforcement, legal, aviation, and communications compatriots arrayed over a half-dozen continents.

  Some specific thank-you’s, however, are appropriate.

  First, my great appreciation to my editor at Putnam, David Highfill, and to my publisher, Leslie Gelbman, for all their help and enthusiasm, and to my agents, George and Olga Wieser of the Wieser and Wieser Agency in New York.

  Thanks also to Dr. Gary Cowart of Seattle, now an outstanding dentist and fellow author, but thirty years ago a Marine stationed near Da Nang, Vietnam. Gary helped immensely in checking and refining my personal memories of Vietnam in getting the terrain, flora, and fauna right. And thanks also to Dr. Cowart’s brother, Randy, who added insight to a delightful afternoon of maps and memories.

  My specific thanks as well to retired FBI Agent Larry Montague, who once again lent his expertise to make sure Kat Bronsky’s world squares with the real thing.

  There are some folks I’ve got to thank anonymously for obvious reasons: the individual inside the U.S. State Department who helped with a myriad of information from Vietnam to the way a Secretary of State uses communications; the unnamed source who helped with the capabilities of the National Reconnaissance Office; and a supervisor at Hong Kong Approach who sidestepped the normal political worries late one night to talk to me.

  And thanks as well to the uncounted Kat Bronskys out there who are truly Kat’s prototype: capable, professional, dedicated women who refuse to surrender their femininity or their sense of humor in the face of the indefensible career barriers raised by the clueless among my gender.