by David Capps
“No,” Stafford said. “I ran the tail number—it’s fake. So is the FedEx paint job. All FedEx planes are accounted for and verified.”
“What about the onboard navigation system?”
“Not working. Someone put a bullet through it.”
“Is it okay if I take a look inside?”
“Sure. Both CID and FBI crime scene technicians have finished with it.”
Jake walked toward the plane and looked it over. He wandered around the outside, stopping to examine all of the details of the plane. There were spots of dirt, or dust, stuck in places that didn’t get as much airflow during flight, like in the recesses for the door handles and latching mechanisms. He wiped his finger through the dust and rubbed them together. Gritty, he thought. Not fine dust like you’d get with farmland. There’s a sand component, but not as coarse as beach sand. Interesting.
The side door was open. He climbed inside the cargo compartment. There was more space in there than he would have imagined. He couldn’t stand up straight because of the low ceiling. The cargo area and the flight deck were separated by a U-shaped panel and thick nylon straps. He hopped back out and opened the left front door. He pulled himself up and sat in the pilot’s seat. There were three 10-inch displays across the front, plus dials, gauges, buttons, switches and controls. He wondered what might have been going through the mind of the person who flew the plane with a hydrogen bomb in the back. He couldn’t imagine.
The opposite door opened and Honi scrambled in and sat in the co-pilot seat.
“Figure anything out?”
“Yeah, the pilot didn’t have a lot of civil air experience—probably military; which would make sense. He disabled the onboard navigation system by shooting it. But the onboard system is only part of a larger operation. You can’t fly anywhere in the country without showing up on somebody’s control board.”
Jake used his phone to locate the number and called LAX.
“This is FBI Special Agent Hunter. I need to talk with your Air Traffic Control Supervisor.” He waited. “Yes, I’m at the Corona Municipal Airport. I’m sitting in a Cessna, like the kind used by FedEx. It arrived sometime between midnight and six this morning. It is relatively new, so it’s probably Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast equipped. Can you give me the identifying information on that plane?”
“But this is Corona, not LAX,” Honi said.
“It’s still inside the LA Area Control Center. They’ll know.”
Jake pulled out his notebook and a pen. “Yes, repeat that again, please. It’s a Cessna 208 Caravan. Okay, and the tail number? Thank you.”
He finished writing down the information.
“Now we have the correct tail number. We know the bomb left Dallas/Fort Worth and ended up here in LA. The next place to check is the Area Control Center in Albuquerque. They had to cross through that area on their way here.”
He completed the second call and turned toward Honi.
“Albuquerque issued an MSAW night before last to this plane, which was ignored.”
“A what?”
“Minimum Safe Altitude Warning. The pilot of this plane landed it where there is no airport.”
“Where?”
“Northwest New Mexico.”
They both jumped out of the plane and ran over to Stafford.
Honi called Ellington at the NSA. “It’s Honi. I need the NRO to focus on this GPS coordinate in New Mexico, twenty-five mile radius. Scour every square yard. See if anything unusual is going on there.” She listened. “Yes,” she replied. “Probable connection to the BENT SPEAR operation. Thank you.” She disconnected.
Jake nervously paced around the command area for twenty minutes, a deep frown on his features. He occasionally looked up into the dark sky. He suddenly stopped and returned to Honi and Stafford. “I think the plane in LA is a diversion. I think they dropped the B83 off in New Mexico and flew the empty plane here. They disabled the avionics package thinking we wouldn’t know where they had been, and left us to panic.”
“We still have to check everything out,” Stafford said. “We have to make sure that the bomb isn’t here.”
“Of course you do. But Agent Badger and I have to get to New Mexico. Tonight.”
* * *
Jake and Honi were transported by Black Hawk helicopter back to the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base in Long Beach, and from there the FBI jet took them to Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Briggs had arranged to have the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) join them at Kirtland, along with a NEST unit. At 3:00 a.m. Jake held the briefing.
“As you may be aware, this is a BENT SPEAR level operation. We are missing a 1.2 megaton thermonuclear bomb. We believe it was put on a truck in Fort Worth, driven to Wichita Falls, put on a Cessna 208 Caravan and then transferred to another vehicle somewhere in this northwest corridor of New Mexico. The NRO has analyzed the entire area from satellite images and IR scans. They have identified this area as having an unusual amount of tire marks compared to the surrounding terrain. They have also identified what looks like a landing strip. The area is remote and not secured. We are looking for any and all radioactive trace material and any signs of unusual activity. Any questions?”
“Yes,” an HRT member spoke up. “What do you consider unusual activity?”
Jake looked at the large map on the wall behind him and then back to the HRT member. “Where we’re going, if it has two legs or leaves tire marks, it’s unusual.”
“Got it, sir.”
“Time is critical, gentlemen. Let’s load up.”
Jake and Honi put on the bullet-resistant vests supplied to them and picked up the M-16 rifles and ammo clips. The search team climbed into the three UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which took off, heading west-northwest in the predawn darkness. Their flight took them north of Gallup and into the low, scrub-covered Chuska Mountains, with a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet.
The darkness gave way to a gray diffused light as dawn approached. The terrain recognition software built into the UH-60 Black Hawk navigation system quickly identified a make-shift airstrip in a shallow valley. The three helicopters landed on the north end of the runway. The search team climbed out of the Black Hawks and spread out with weapons, ready to secure the area. Once the helicopter blades stopped and the dust settled, Jake listened intently for any sound. Only dead silence remained.
Jake, Honi and the search team slowly made their way down the dirt runway. Jake paused, reached down, picked up a pinch of the dirt and rubbed it between his fingers. Gritty. The same feel as the dust on the FedEx 208 Caravan. This is where it landed.
On the south end of the runway they found truck tire tracks leading up an incline to the right. A primitive road had been roughly carved out of the side of the valley. Half a mile up the slope was a widened flat area with a rock wall on the west side. The truck tracks pulled east, almost to the edge, swiveled, and backed up to the rock wall. Except the tracks didn’t stop several feet from the wall, as Jake expected; they went right under the wall.
“It’s a door,” Jake said. “It opens.”
Jake could now see that the generally flat nature of the wall was artificially constructed. He took his knuckles and rapped softly on the door. Fiberglass. Nice job. If I wasn’t standing right in front of it, I would have missed it. The door was about twelve feet high and thirty feet wide. Three members of the HRT grabbed the bottom of the door and pulled. The door started to open as the other HRT members dropped to the ground and aimed their rifles inside the enclosed space. The door continued to open and folded back inside the carved-out space near the ceiling. The space was empty, approximately fourteen feet high, thirty feet deep and thirty feet wide. The walls appeared to be solid rock and the floor was clean poured concrete. It was a man-made cave.
Jake found four light metallic scrape marks on the floor, each spaced fifteen feet apart in a perfect square pattern. “I want samples of the metal for analysis.”
The NEST unit carefully swept the enclosed area with their radiation sensors.
“B83 radiation signature,” one of the technicians reported. “The device was here.”
Another technician adjusted the settings on his equipment and walked slowly over the concrete area once again. He went back to the center of the area, adjusted his equipment again and started crawling around on the floor, his sensor a quarter of an inch above the pavement. Jake walked over to him.
“What have you got?”
The technician looked up at Jake with a worried expression. “Not here,” he whispered.
Jake raised his eyebrows and gave the man an inquisitive look.
“Give me a minute,” he said quietly.
Jake stepped back and continued to study the enclosed area. The logical thing was to fly the B83 out, but what kind of aircraft would fit in here? It was too short for a helicopter, and no way for a fixed-wing aircraft to get to the runway. The wings wouldn’t fit down the narrow road. Plus, the only tracks in the dirt were from the truck. More and more of the facts in this investigation just weren’t adding up.
The NEST technician stood up and walked out of the wide cave and motioned Jake to follow him. Jake motioned for Honi to join them. The three of them walked a quarter mile down the dirt road without saying a word. The technician stopped and turned to face Jake and Honi.
“Look,” he said quietly. “I know this may sound crazy to you, but you’ve got to listen. My name is Grigori Andropov. I’ve got a PhD in quantum physics. Agent Badger, you can check my security clearance when we get back inside cell phone coverage, that may help convince you that what I’m about to tell you is true. The military calls me out on special investigations. Things that are never meant to become public. I need you to keep that confidence. My life depends on it. I work under the name of Russell Stevens. My specialty is exotic radioactive materials and how they are affected by quantum fields.”
“Where did you get your PhD?” Jake asked.
“St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.”
Honi nodded. “It’s on the list.”
“So what did you find?”
“The B83 radioactive signature is there, alright. It’s on the surface of the concrete all around the room, except the center section is mixed with another radioactive substance.”
“A second weapon?”
Andropov shook his head. “Not a weapon, an energy source. It doesn’t even appear on our periodic table of elements. Theoretically, it’s element 115. I’ve seen this pattern before at different sites where the military sent me to investigate.”
“What kind of sites?”
Andropov hesitated. “UFO landing sites.”
“What?” Jake said, stepping back from Andropov. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Really? UFO landing sites?” Honi asked.
Andropov nodded. “They’re real. I’ve seen them on the ground, too. When they take off, they leave a very distinctive energy pattern with residual radiation, just like you have in that cave.”
Jake was still skeptical. “And the four metallic scrapes on the floor?”
“Similar to the strut and pad pattern I’ve seen at other landing sites.”
Jake breathed out heavily. “So where is the B83?”
“I wish I had an answer for you. What I was working on was highly compartmentalized and very specialized.”
“Would you be willing to come into the NSA and work with us?” Honi asked.
“Maybe. I report directly to General Davies, no one else. If he wants me to be there, I’ll work with you. Otherwise…”
“General Roger L. Davies, Commanding General of the United States Army Forces Command?.That General Davies?”
Andropov nodded. “He’s the one who put me in your NEST unit. No one else knows, and I need it to stay that way.”
Jake glanced at Honi. She gave a quick nod. “Okay. It stays that way.”
They walked back and joined the group in the cave.
“A truck obviously carried the bomb from the FedEx plane to the cave. The radioactive residue is clearly present,” a member of the NEST unit said.
“If the truck brought the bomb to the cave, where is it?” another NEST member argued. “And if the truck left with the bomb and drove it away, why go to the cave at all? Why not just leave directly from the plane?”
Another member said, “There must have been something in the cave that someone needed. That’s why they drove to the cave. To pick up the other object.”
But someone else argued, “Why not put that object in the truck first and then leave directly from the plane?”
A fourth member of the six-man NEST unit stated, “If all the truck did was pick something up from the cave, the residual radiation wouldn’t be all over the floor. That would happen only if the B83 was physically unloaded from the truck.”
Andropov wandered around with his sensor, ignoring the on-going argument.
Jake and Honi stepped away from the cave. “So what do you think?” Honi asked.
“About what Andropov said?”
She nodded.
“Frankly, I don’t know what to think. The official position is that UFOs don’t exist, but apparently they do.”
“I’ve seen reports. Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, March of 1967. A UFO flew over the base, hovered over the ICBM silos and shut everything down. All of the nuclear weapons were deactivated. It took months to get all the systems working again. The Russians have had similar experiences. So have NATO and the British. In every encounter, the nuclear weapons were deactivated, and the entire control system had to be replaced. If a UFO was involved here, why take the weapon? Why not deactivate it and leave it behind, like they have done in the past? Again, just too many things aren’t adding up.”
Jake wandered over to the edge of the hill. “I can’t believe I’m having to deal with UFOs now. An hour ago, I couldn’t have imagined such a development. What do we tell Stafford?”
Honi shrugged. “We know it wasn’t on the FedEx plane. It was unloaded here.”
“And put on a UFO? Is that what we tell Stafford?”
Honi shook her head. “Even if it’s true, I don’t think we can tell him that.”
Jake looked into the emerging dawn light, breathed deeply and tried to refocus his mind. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t get to LA by some other means. The weapon being here in the past isn’t conclusive. It could be anywhere now.”
“Either way, I think Stafford needs to complete his search. He has to make sure it isn’t there.”
“Agreed. But that doesn’t get us any closer to where it actually is. Hell, it could be anywhere.”
“It could. What piques my curiosity is why and how Andropov got placed in our NEST unit.”
“By General Davies. He obviously knows something that we don’t. When are we going to find that out?”
CHAPTER 13
When Jake and Honi returned to the NSA building later that afternoon, Ken Bartholomew was waiting for them in the lobby.
“So why am I here?” Ken asked.
“We’ve got some money issues for you to help us explain,” Honi said.
Once down in B6, area 4, Jake and Honi showed Ken the display for the new project. Brett explained the color code and the correlations they had made so far. Ken studied the display for a few minutes.
“How do I get more information from the display?” Ken asked.
“It’s interactive,” Brett said. “Touch any node on the screen.”
Ken walked over to the display and touched one of the dark green spots. A rectangle popped up identifying the Central European Bank, its location, and eight menu options, including ledger sheet, account balances, transfers and reserves. Ken touched the upper right corner of the rectangle and the information disappeared.
“And all of this is some kind of a criminal enterprise?” Ken asked.
“Yes,” Honi replied.
“This is huge.”
&nbs
p; “Yes, it is,” Honi replied. “It runs through every country in the world.”
“I didn’t mean that kind of huge, but yeah, that, too. Just being able to correlate all of this information is amazing. But you’re missing something important.”
“Like what?” Brett asked.
“There’s an underground economy that dwarfs what you have here. People deal with gold, silver and cash all of the time. They just don’t use banks.”
“Like General Teague and his shipping container,” Jake said.
“Exactly. You don’t have any of that on your display.”
“That’s because the information’s not available,” Honi said.
“Actually, a good portion of it is,” Ken said. “The Secret Service has been building its own database to assist with counterfeiting investigations. We also track gold and silver transactions. I bet you don’t have the Bank of International Settlements in Geneva on your system, do you?”
Brett typed and looked at the display. “No, we don’t.”
“There’s a whole system of bullion banks that deal only with gold, platinum and silver. No paper money, no credit, no electronic transfers–just the physical precious metals in bullion and coins,” Ken said. “I can get you that database.”
“Please do,” Honi said. “The sooner, the better.”
“If you’ll escort me out, I can have that for you in an hour.”
“I’ll go with him,” Jake said.
* * *
When Jake and Ken returned an hour later, Grigori Andropov was waiting in the lobby of the NSA building. Jake approached him and glanced at his ID card clipped to his shirt pocket, unsure of what name he was using.
“Russell, good to see you again. This is Ken Bartholomew from the Secret Service.”
The two men shook hands as Honi came walking over.
“Everybody ready to go to work? Then, let’s go.” She led them down to B6, area 4 and introduced the new member to Brett and Tracy.
“Here’s where we need your help,” Jake said. “If I understand correctly, you were here.” Jake pointed to the university from which Andropov graduated. “Thirty-two percent of the money went into theoretical quantum physics.”