MOJAVE DESERT, CALIFORNIA
IT WAS A MYTH, THE MAN DECIDED, AN OLD WIVES’ tale. Often he had heard how the desert’s broiling daytime temperatures gave way to freezing cold at night. But in the high desert of Southern California in July, he could testify, that wasn’t the case. Sweat soaked the underarms of his thin black sweater and pooled in a damp mass around his lower back. The temperature was still at least ninety degrees. He glanced at his luminescent watch, verifying it was indeed two in the morning.
The heat didn’t exactly overwhelm him. He’d been born in Central America and had lived and fought guerrilla campaigns in the region’s jungles his entire life. But the desert was new to him, and he simply hadn’t expected the nighttime heat.
He gazed across the dusty landscape to a conglomeration of glowing streetlamps. They marked the entrance to a large open-pit mining complex spread across the hills before him.
“Eduardo should nearly be in place opposite the guard station,” he said to a bearded man lying prone in a nearby sandy depression.
He was similarly clad in black, from combat boots to the thin stocking cap pulled low over his head. Sweat glistened off his face as he sipped from a water bottle.
“I wish he would hurry. There are rattlesnakes around here.”
His partner grinned in the dark. “Juan, that would be the least of our problems.”
A minute later, the handheld radio on his belt chirped with two static transmissions.
“That’s him. Let’s move.”
They arose and put on light backpacks. Lights from the mine buildings were sprinkled across the hillside in front of them, casting a pale glow over the barren desert. They hiked a short distance to a chain-link fence that encircled the complex. The taller man knelt and rummaged through his pack for a pair of wire cutters.
“Pablo, I think we can get through without cutting,” his partner whispered, then pointed to a dry wash that ran beneath the fence.
The sandy ground was soft in the middle of the creek bed, and he easily pushed some of it aside with his foot. Pablo joined him in scraping away the loose soil until they had excavated a small hole beneath the fence. Pushing their packs under it, they quickly shimmied through.
A low blend of rumbling noises filled the air, the mechanical bedlam of an open-pit mine that operated around the clock. The two men stayed clear of the guard station, to their right, and made their way up a gentle slope toward the mine itself. A ten-minute hike brought them to a cluster of aged buildings crisscrossed with large conveyor belts. A front-end loader at the far end was shoveling piles of ore onto one of the moving belts, which transported it to a hopper on stilts.
The two men were headed to a second cluster of buildings farther up the hill. The mine pit blocked their way, forcing them to cut through the operations area, where ore was crushed and milled. Clinging to the shadows, they darted along the perimeter, then worked their way along the back of a large storage building. Reaching an exposed area between buildings, they moved quickly, striding past a semiburied bunker to their left. Suddenly a door flung open at the center of the building ahead of them. The two men split up, Juan ducking to the side and scrambling behind the bunker while Pablo sprinted ahead toward the side of the building.
He didn’t make it.
A bright yellow beam snapped on, blinding him.
“Hold it right there or you’ll regret taking that next step,” said a low, gravely voice.
Pablo stopped in midstride. But as he made an exaggerated stop, he deftly withdrew a mini automatic pistol from his left hip and concealed it in the palm of his gloved hand.
The overweight security guard walked slowly toward him, keeping his flashlight pointed into Pablo’s eyes. The guard could see the intruder was a large, well-proportioned man, over six feet tall. His coffee-colored skin was smooth and pliant, in contrast to black eyes that burned with malignant intensity. A lighter band of flesh crossed his chin and left jaw, the souvenir from an ancient knife fight.
The guard saw enough to know he wasn’t an accidental trespasser and stopped a healthy distance away, clutching a .357 Magnum.
“How about you put your hands on your head and then you can tell me where your friend went.”
The rumble of a nearby conveyor drowned out Juan’s footsteps as he sprinted from the bunker and plunged a knife into the guard’s kidney. Shock registered on the guard’s face momentarily before his whole body tensed. A wayward shot erupted from his revolver, whistling high over Pablo’s head. Then the guard fell, his body kicking up a swirl of dust as it struck the ground.
Pablo thrust his gun forward, expecting additional guards to rush to the scene, but none came. The gunshot had been lost amid the rumbling of conveyor belts and the pounding of the rockcrusher. A quick radio call to Eduardo confirmed there was no activity at the front gate. No one else in the facility had realized their presence.
Juan wiped his knife clean on the shirt of the dead man. “How did he spot us?”
Pablo glanced toward the bunker. For the first time, he noticed a red-and-white sign on the door proclaiming DANGER: EXPLOSIVE MATERIALS. “That bunker houses explosives. It must be under surveillance.”
Blind luck, he cursed to himself. The explosives bunker wasn’t marked on his map. Now their whole operation was jeopardized.
“Should we blow it?” Juan asked.
They had been ordered to disrupt the facility but to make it look accidental. That had suddenly become a tall order. The bunker explosives could be made useful, but it was too far from their actual target.
“Let it be.”
“Do we leave the guard here?” Juan asked.
Pablo shook his head. He unbuckled the guard’s holster, then pulled off the man’s shoes. He searched the guard’s pockets and retrieved his wallet and half a pack of cigarettes. He stuffed those, along with the .357 Magnum, into his backpack. A growing pool of blood was dampening the ground around his feet. He kicked some loose sand over the blood, then grasped one of the guard’s arms. Juan grabbed the other, and they dragged the body into the darkness.
Thirty yards away, they reached an elevated conveyor on which melon-sized chunks of ore whirled by. With a labored heave, the men swung the guard’s body onto the moving belt. Pablo watched as the guard was carried up the conveyor and deposited into a large metal hopper.
The ore, a mixed fluorocarbonate known as bastnasite, had already passed through an initial crusher and sorter. The guard’s body joined a second round of pulverization that smashed the ore to baseball-sized pieces. A tertiary crushing repeated the process, pounding the rocks into a fine gravel. Had anyone examined the rough brown powder that accumulated off the final conveyor, they would have noticed an odd red tint that marked the guard’s last remains.
Though the crushing and milling were important stages in the mine’s operations, they were less critical than the secondary complex up the hill. Pablo eyed the lights of several buildings in the distance, where the milled ore was leached and separated into a handful of mineral components. Spotting no moving vehicles in the area, he and Juan took off at a quick clip.
The men had to skirt the eastern edge of the open pit, jumping into a culvert when a dump truck rumbled by. A short time later, Eduardo alerted them that a security guard was making the rounds in a pickup truck. They ducked behind a mound of tailings, then lay frozen for nearly twenty minutes until the truck returned to the front gate.
They moved toward the two largest buildings in the upper complex, then veered right and approached a small shack that fronted a towering propane tank. Juan took the wire cutters and snipped an opening in the surrounding chain-link fence. Pablo slipped through, circled the big tank, and knelt before its fill valve. Removing a small plastic explosives charge from his backpack, he attached a detonator cap and placed it beneath the valve. He set the digital timer for twenty minutes, activated it, and scurried back through the fence.
On the ground a few feet away, Pablo scattered the guard’s
shoes, gun, and holster. The wallet came next, still containing its cash, then the rumpled pack of cigarettes. It was a long shot, but a superficial investigation might finger the guard for accidentally igniting a leaky tank—then being vaporized by the blast.
The two men scurried toward the next building, a large metal structure containing dozens of mechanized vats filled with leaching solutions. A small group of graveyard shift laborers monitored the vats.
The two intruders made no attempt to enter the building; instead they targeted a large pen storing chemical agents alongside one wall. In less than a minute Pablo attached a second timed charge to a pallet of drums labeled SULFURIC ACID, then escaped into the darkness.
They made their way to a second extraction building a hundred yards away, taking their time as the timers counted down. At the rear of the building, Pablo found the valve for a main water line. Monitoring his watch until just before the detonations, he twisted the valve, shutting off water to the building.
A few seconds later, the propane tank ignited with a boom that reverberated off the nearby hills. Night turned into day as a fiery blue glow enveloped the landscape. The top portion of the tank blew off like an Atlas rocket, screaming into the sky before crashing into the nearby open-pit mine in a ball of flame. Burning shrapnel flew in all directions, peppering buildings, cars, and equipment within a hundred yards of the tank.
The debris was still falling when the second detonation launched a mountain of barrels filled with sulfuric acid into the first extraction facility. Screaming workers fled the interior as the projectiles shredded the ore-leaching vats, releasing a nasty soup of toxic chemicals. Smoke billowed as the doors were flung open and the occupants staggered out.
Juan and Pablo lay in a ditch near the second building, dodging bits of raining debris as they watched a nearby door. At the sound of the explosions, a few curious workers poked their heads outside to investigate. Seeing the smoke and flames from the extraction facility, they called inside to their coworkers, then sprinted to the other building to help. Pablo counted six people rush out before he rose and moved toward the door.
“Stay here and cover me.”
As he reached for the door handle, it twisted from the other side. He jumped back from the opening door as a woman in a lab coat burst out. Her eyes focused on the nearby smoke, she never noticed him behind the door as she nervously followed after her coworkers.
Pablo slipped through the door, stepping into a brightly lit bay filled with dozens more extraction tanks. He turned left and moved to the far end of the building, where large storage tanks lined the wall. He studied their labels, then approached one of the larger tanks. KEROSENE. He tore away a bleed hose from its base, then opened its brass drain valve. A torrent of the liquid flooded across the floor and filled the bay with a gassy odor.
Pablo grabbed a bundle of lab coats from a rack and scurried through the building, stuffing them into all the floor drains. The thin liquid spread quickly, nearly covering the concrete floor. The arsonist made his way back to the door, then pulled a lighter from his pocket. As kerosene trickled past his feet, he leaned down and ignited it, then jumped from the building.
With a low volatility and high flash point, the kerosene didn’t explode, instead igniting in a river of flame. As fire detectors erupted throughout the building, ceiling-mounted sprinklers kicked on—but only for a second, as the disrupted water supply ran dry. Unabated, the fire spread.
Pablo didn’t look back as he ran to his partner in the gully.
Juan looked up and shook his head. “Eduardo says the front gate sentry is on his way.”
Across the grounds, sirens and alarms wailed. But no one had yet noticed the swirl of smoke from the roof of the adjacent building. At three in the morning, no one at the facility was prepared to deal with multiple fires, and municipal firefighters were thirty miles away.
Pablo wasted no time watching the incineration. He nodded at his partner, then sprang off to the east. Juan had to scramble to catch up. They crossed the dirt road that led to the front gate moments before an approaching vehicle drew near. The terrain beyond the road turned to open rolling desert, and they dove to the ground as the first security vehicle roared by. Another chain-link fence appeared a short distance away. They cut a gap just big enough for one to slip under while the other pulled up the mesh.
In forty minutes of steady hiking, they reached the main highway two miles away, draining their supply of bottled water. They paralleled the highway east a short distance until spotting a black four-door pickup truck parked near a culvert, neatly hidden from easy view. Eduardo, the third partner, sat behind the wheel in a worn polo shirt, smoking a cigarette.
The two men dropped their packs and pulled off their black hats and sweaters, replacing them with T-shirts and baseball caps.
“Congratulations,” Eduardo said. “It appears you have succeeded.”
For the first time, Pablo looked back at the mine facility. Billowing clouds of smoke hung over the complex, illuminated by streaks of orange flame that leaped from several sources. The mine’s firefighting equipment was woefully inadequate to deal with the fires. By all appearances, the inferno was still spreading.
Pablo allowed himself a half grin. Except for the appearance of the watchman, everything had gone according to plan. The two main extraction facilities, the heart of the complex, would soon be reduced to charred wreckage. Unable to process ore, the entire operation would grind to a standstill for at least a year, maybe two. And if they were lucky, it might all go down as an unfortunate accident.
Juan followed his gaze, watching the pyre with satisfaction. “Looks like we set the whole state on fire tonight.”
The distant flames glistened in the big man’s eyes as he turned to Juan.
“No, my friend,” he said with a wicked grin. “We have set the whole world on fire.”
2
SWEAT TRICKLED DOWN THE PRESIDENT’S NECK, dampening the collar of his starched white shirt. The mercury was hovering near triple digits, unusual for June in Connecticut. A slight breeze off Block Island Sound failed to cut the humidity, leaving the riverside shipyard a sweltering hothouse. Inside a massive green assembly bay known as Building 260, the air-conditioning fought a futile battle with the afternoon heat.
The Electric Boat Corporation had begun building diesel marine engines on the site along the Thames River in 1910, but ultimately submarine construction became the company’s bread and butter. The Groton shipyard delivered its first submarine to the Navy in 1934, and had since constructed every major class of U.S. underwater warship. Nearing completion inside the green building stood the imposing hull of the North Dakota, the latest fast attack submarine of the Virginia class.
From a scaffold stairway that led from the North Dakota’s conning tower, the President stepped heavily onto the concrete floor with a grunt. A large-framed man who hated confined spaces, he was thankful the interior tour was over. At least it had been cooler inside the submarine. With the economy a mess and Congress mired in another deadlock, visiting a shipyard seemed like the last priority on his agenda, but he had promised the Secretary of the Navy he would go boost the morale of the ship workers. As a small entourage flocked to catch up with him, he suppressed his irritation by marveling at the sub’s dimensions.
“An amazing feat of construction.”
“Yes, sir,” said a blond-haired man in a tailored suit who hung at the President’s elbow as if attached by a string. “She’s an impressive feat of technology.” Assistant Chief of Staff Tom Cerny had specialized in defense issues on Capitol Hill before joining the administration.
“She’s slightly longer than the Seawolf class boats, but downright minuscule compared to a Trident,” said the tour guide, a chipper Electric Boat engineering manager. “Most people are used to seeing them in the water, where two-thirds of their bulk is hidden from view.”
The President nodded. As it lay on huge supporting blocks, the three-hundred-and-seventy-seven
-foot-long hull towered over them.
“She’ll be a great addition to our arsenal. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to see her up close.”
A granite-faced admiral named Winters stepped forward.
“Mr. President, while we were happy to have you preview the North Dakota, she was not the reason we asked you up here.”
The President took off a white hard hat affixed with the presidential seal, handed it to the admiral, and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.
“If a cold drink and a touch more air-conditioning can be worked into the bargain, then lead on.”
He was escorted across the building to a small door guarded by a uniformed security man. The door was unlocked, and the presidential group led in one by one, their faces captured by a video camera above the sill.
The admiral flicked on a bank of overhead lights, illuminating a narrow bay that stretched nearly four hundred feet. The President saw another submarine in a state of near completion, but this vessel was like nothing he had ever seen before.
Roughly half the size of the North Dakota, it sported a radically different design. Its unusually narrow jet-black hull tapered sharply at the bow. A low, egg-shaped conning tower rose just a few feet above its top deck. Two large streamlined pods were affixed close to the stern, almost in the shape of a dolphin’s tail. But the most unusual feature was a pair of retractable stabilizers, shaped like triangular wings, that stretched from either side. A pack of four large tubular canisters clung to their undersides.
The design reminded the President of a giant manta ray he’d seen while fishing off Baja California.
“What on earth is this thing?” he asked. “I wasn’t aware we were building anything other than the Virginia class boats.”
“Sir, this is the Sea Arrow,” the admiral said. “It’s a prototype platform developed under a secret R & D program to test highly advanced technologies.”
Cerny turned on the admiral. “Why wasn’t the President informed of this program? I’d like to know how it was funded.”
Dirk Pitt 22 - Poseidon's Arrow Page 2