Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “Yesterday, early. I had a few things to check out on the ground before I could be completely sure you wouldn’t be running into a buzz saw, if you know what I mean.”

  They got into the Land Rover, Marks behind the wheel, and headed away from the airport. “I’ve booked you a suite in the InterContintenal for three days, though I expect you’ll be gone before that.”

  “I’m heading up tonight, and taking the morning flight to Geneva if all goes well,” DeCamp said. “What about weapons?”

  “You specified the 9mm Steyr GB for your handgun. It’s in your kit along with four eighteen-round mags, and a suppressor. But I also brought a Knight PDW with four thirty-round mags. It’s been modified to pull down the muzzle velocity to subsonic so it can be silenced as well. It’s short, lightweight, and capable of putting up to seven hundred rounds per minute on target.”

  “I know the weapon,” DeCamp said. “It’s a good choice.”

  “I didn’t know if breaking and entering or shock-and-awe tactics might be a consideration, but I brought a mixed bag of small Semtex packets and the appropriate fuses, plus a pair of Haley and Weller multiburst stun grenades that make no sound as the cap fires, a K-BAR knife and a night-vision ocular. All of it is untraceable of course, so when your op is completed you can drop it in place.”

  “The pistol and perhaps the knife may be all I’ll need,” DeCamp said. “Clothing?”

  “Nothing military, of course. But knowing your sizes helped. Dark jeans, a black polo shirt, and a reversible Windbreaker. White on the outside so you won’t attract attention on the drive up, and black on the inside. Dark Nikes.”

  “Transportation?”

  “You’ll take this machine. It’s a bit less than five hundred klicks round-trip, so you’ll have plenty of petrol, and the registration is also untraceable, so if the need should arise, you can simply park it and walk away. Otherwise bring it back to the hotel and leave it with the valet.”

  “Coms?

  “An encrypted Nokia, my number programmed in. After twenty-four hours its memory will be erased. And soon as you’re gone I’ll sterilize your track.”

  They were coming into the capital city and traffic on Highway 33, Airport Road, was heavy with Mercedes and BMWs plus a smattering of Rolls and Bentleys. The UAE, despite Dubai’s financial meltdown a couple of years before, was in very good shape. And as long as oil continued at seventy dollars per barrel or higher, life there was good.

  “I could have used you on my last op,” DeCamp said. “Wouldn’t have to be wasting my time here.”

  Marks glanced at him. “When you called for backup, I figured it might have been you involved in that dustup in the Gulf of Mexico. Was it a double-cross?”

  DeCamp had debated how deeply to involve Marks beyond the logistics, and yet other than Martine and before her Colonel Frazer, he’d never had anyone to talk to. And he was already missing it.

  “It didn’t go exactly as planned, but instead of coming after me they hit someone very close. Someone defenseless.”

  Marks drove the rest of the way in silence until they were within sight of the hotel. “Revenge is not always the best course, Colonel.”

  “I agree, Sergeant, but this time it’s necessary,” DeCamp said. “Now tell me where you got your intel.”

  And Marks did. Both sources.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  It was already four in the afternoon when Gail walked back across A1A from the South Service Building, the containment wall that blocked reactor one looming ominously into the clear blue Florida sky, and she felt the deepest sense of failure in her entire life since her father’s death. She hadn’t been there for him, just as she hadn’t been there for her partner. And coming back now brought everything into her mind in living color, and it wasn’t pleasant.

  Most of the work was being done on the north side of the facility, where power from Vanessa, when and if it ever got here and was put into service, would be led to the transformer yard, and from there connected to the grid. That side of the plant had been saved any radiation damage so the linemen and engineers were able to work without hazmat suits.

  The decontamination tent was up and running, empty of personnel just now, and Gail stopped a moment to look toward the south down the highway where Schlagel’s followers by the thousands had begun showing up early that morning. Some of them had set up tents, while others had parked their motor homes or travel trailers just off the side of the road within a few feet of the National Guardsmen manning the barriers. A1A was supposed to open for normal traffic within the week, but for now only people essential to the decontamination and rebuilding programs were being allowed through.

  Yesterday was Sunday and Schlagel had been in Washington, making all the morning news shows including Face the Nation and Meet the Press , arguing that nuclear power was not the future of America’s desperate energy situation, nor was it a viable answer to the carbon dioxide issue and global warming. He was sorry for the tragedy in the Gulf, the loss of lives among his followers as well as those aboard Vanessa Explorer, but that abomination to God’s will was currently under repairs and the Hutchinson Island power station, which would never produce nuclear electricity again — thank the Lord God Almighty — was making preparations to receive energy from the God Project.

  “You can laugh at the coming Armageddon or the apocalypse if you want — and at your own peril — but the seed of our destruction is at this moment making its way to Florida!” Schlagel had preached. “It must be stopped at all costs. Save your lives, save America’s life, believe in God, and your salvation will be assured. Turn your back on His holy will at your peril!”

  And they were coming. The last estimates Gail had gotten from Eric was that 100,000 or more people were on the move across the U.S., all of them converging on Florida’s east coast. Fox was calling it the greatest mass exodus in the history of the United States, and one of Schlagel’s SOS network commentators said that “God’s hammer was poised to strike, so sinners beware.”

  The reverend himself flitted here and there, showing up with a lot of fanfare to talk to members of his “flock” as he called them in Kansas, then Ohio, in Michigan and Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia, and last night in Orlando, Florida. His people were on the move and so was he.

  Eve was at the north end of the plant working with the engineers, and now that she was back at it Gail thought the lady scientist was happy again. They’d gotten a suite at the Hotel Indigo up in Vero Beach but in the two days they’d been down there neither of them had watched television, Eve because she only came back to the suite to shower and sleep, and Gail because she was getting the real news from Eric. So to this point Eve was all but unaware of the true size and seriousness of the gathering storm.

  She turned and looked back toward the South Service Building, wondering why she had bothered to suit up and go inside, because very little was left. The control room, along with all the offices on the second floor had been gutted, the slightly radioactive debris bagged and taken away. Even the walls had been stripped bare, the floor tiles taken up, and the engineers were working out ways to seal the concrete that would cost the company less money than tearing the building down and starting from scratch.

  The facility’s chief engineer, Chris Strasser, had confided in her yesterday that he thought the power plant would never reopen. “It won’t be safe to tear down reactor two for a thousand years,” he’d said. “And there’s the problem with South Service.”

  “The mood of the country is against nukes right now, so you might have a tough time getting the necessary permits anyway,” she’d told him, but he’d given her a blank look. He was a nuclear engineer, after all, not a politician.

  “It’s the only reason the company’s giving Dr. Larsen a shot. If her project works, and if the security concerns are taken care of, it could save us a considerable amount of money. In the tens of millions.”

  Money. Everything was about money, and right now some of the major players we
re beginning to step up to the plate to take their shots; either to protect big oil for as long as possible by delaying nuclear permitting and stopping Eve, or by positioning themselves to look as if they were supporting her. Because if her final experiment actually worked, and electricity began flowing into the Eastern Interconnect, which supplied power to the eastern third of the country, the full project would be worth somewhere in the range of fifty trillion dollars, and possibly more by the time it was finished. Bigger than the Panama Canal by some order of magnitude. And that was some serious money.

  Inside the tent Gail went through the automatic showers, foam baths and showers again, before stripping off her hazmat suit and placing it in one of the barrels, then she went through another series of showers, taking special care to clean under her fingernails and toenails.

  When she was done she padded naked, except for a towel around her neck, into the locker room, and McGarvey was there smiling at her. And his being there took her breath away.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, and she began to shiver, though it wasn’t cold, not realizing until just that moment how much she had missed him. She went to him and he held her until she began to calm down.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Now I am,” she told him honestly. “Where have you been? Otto wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I came down from Atlanta last night in a convoy with some of Schalgel’s people, trying to find out what was coming and how soon it was going to happen. I figured that you and Eve were safe as long as you stuck it out here.”

  “Eve is at the north end of the plant.”

  “I know,” McGarvey said. “But you need to get dressed because we have a lot to do and only a couple of hours to get it done.”

  “Is it going to happen tonight?”

  “The word in the mob is that Schlagel will be showing up around six, and his people are being told to get ready for action.”

  “Shit,” Gail said, pulling her clothes out of a locker. “What about the National Guard and the Bureau guys?”

  “The Bureau will stay out of sight, and Colonel Scofield’s people are going to fire some guns into the air, but when crunch time comes they’re going to back off and let the crowd through.”

  “To where?”

  “All the way to the main gate in front of the South Service Building.”

  Gail was slipping on her sneakers and tying the laces, but she stopped and looked up at McGarvey. “You figured out a way to stop him?”

  McGarvey nodded. “He’s going to do it to himself.”

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  It was ten minutes past two in the morning when DeCamp arrived at the Marina Tower apartments in Dubai and entered the six-digit security code at the entrance to the underground parking ramp. During the day an attendant was on duty, but after midnight a hardened steel link gate dropped down from the ceiling. Security codes were changed on a random basis, texted to tenants an hour before they went into effect.

  This was to be the first test of the sergeant’s sources, and when the gate rose DeCamp’s skepticism was dampened somewhat. The problem had been the fantastical and dangerous nature of the sergeant’s informant.

  “Money is a powerful motivator, Colonel,” Marks had offered as an explanation. “For some, the most powerful. And in this instance I had a hunch the woman’s position could be compromised by the very nature of her business dealings. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission considers her a person of extreme interest. Something the UAE government became indifferent to once they had received help with civilian nuclear technology from the States. I thought that since she is all but a fugitive from her own country, perhaps she has stepped on other toes.”

  “Devious,” DeCamp had said with admiration, and Marks had smiled.

  “Ah, the ways of mortal man — or woman — on the path to Mammon,” Marks said. “My mum read the Bible to me till it came out of my ears. You can’t serve two masters. Both Luke and Matthew wrote it in their gospels.”

  DeCamp had smiled inwardly. His mother, on the other hand, had only ever cared for a few things: where her next bottle of booze or fix were coming from and occasionally what particular man she was going to allow between her legs and why.

  Only Martine had ever really cared.

  DeCamp drove inside the garage and took the ramp three levels down, switching off the headlights before he reached the bottom, and holding up at the end of the lane that went directly to the penthouse parking slot and private elevator.

  Marks had promised that the guard, normally stationed in a dark blue E-class Mercedes four positions on the right from the elevator, would be away from the building for exactly sixty minutes starting at 2:00 A.M.

  The only other cars were a black Mercedes Maybach and a ten-year-old white Lamborghini Countach that had been totally restored at the factory in SantAgata Bolognese, belonging to Anne Marie, and a smoke silver Mercedes SL 65 AMG Black, belonging to Wolfhardt.

  DeCamp drove the rest of the way down the lane and backed the Land Rover into the empty fourth slot. Shutting off the engine, he got out, reversed his jacket, screwed the silencer on to the end of the Steyr’s barrel, and walked to the elevator. He moved on the balls of his feet making absolutely no noise as he listened for a sound, any sound to warn him that he had been betrayed and that Marks had sold him out. But there was nothing.

  The elevator car was there, which meant that the last person to use it had come down from the penthouse. Possibly the guard who’d left his post for whatever reason.

  Moving to the side so as to be out of the line of fire, he pushed the call button and as the door slid open he swept his aim across the interior of the empty car.

  One of the old jokes from the Battalion days was that if everything was going according to the operational plan, you were probably heading into a trap. The men didn’t care that special forces just about everywhere had the same jokes, Murphy’s Laws, because they fit.

  The elevator stopped only at the lobby and the penthouse apartment and required a key card, which, as Marks had promised, was in its slot, ready to be swiped, and once again DeCamp paused. The setup was too easy, the information too pat, and every instinct was telling him to turn around and get out while he could. But then he remembered the look on Martine’s face when she knew that he was leaving again, and he could feel and taste her body when they made love, her exotic scent still in his nose.

  He swiped the card, pressed the button for the penthouse, and the car headed up. At the most there should only be three people in the apartment: the Marinaccio woman, possibly one of her personnel security people, and Wolfhardt. The house staff did not live on site so there would be no danger of collateral damage, though for DeCamp that consideration had always been meaningless.

  At the top the elevator slowed to a halt and the doors slid open onto a marble-tiled vestibule, an ornate Italianate fountain softly spewing water from the penis of a small boy.

  Marks had given him a simple sketch diagram of the floor plan. The living room, dining room, conservatory and beyond, the kitchen and pantries were off to the left, while the five bedrooms were straight ahead and to the right. At this hour the woman would almost certainly be in her bedroom at the end of the hall.

  He switched the elevator off, and gingerly stepped out into the vestibule as a dark figure came down the corridor from the left.

  “Phillipe, what the hell are you doing up here?”

  DeCamp turned, catching the image of a short, wiry man in jeans and a white T-shirt standing in the middle of the corridor five meters away reaching for something, and he shot him twice in the middle of the chest, driving him backwards with a soft grunt.

  The sounds of the silenced shots, though muted, seemed loud even over the noise of the water fountain, and DeCamp waited for a full ten seconds to make sure that no one else was coming to investigate. But the penthouse remained quiet.

  DeCamp went to the downed man to make sure he was dead,
careful not to step in the blood, then hurried to the end of the hall where again he stopped for a moment to listen at the door to the woman’s bedroom suite before he went in.

  The large sitting room was straight ahead, the sliding glass doors open to the night breezes off the Persian Gulf. The bedroom, walk-in closets, powder room, and bathroom were to the left.

  Anne Marie’s head appeared over the back of the couch, and DeCamp almost shot her on instinct.

  “We were expecting you, Mr. DeCamp,” she said, apparently completely at ease.

  DeCamp stepped back into the deeper shadows by the door, trying to detect where Wolfhardt was hiding, checking firing angles and lines of sight.

  “Gunther’s not here at the moment, and I have to assume that you have already disposed of my bodyguard Carlos, so it’s just you and me. May we talk, or do you intend to shoot me right now?”

  “Why was my house destroyed and why was Martine murdered?” DeCamp asked. He’d almost said “my woman” instead of Martine.

  “It was a dreadful mistake, believe me,” Anne Marie said. “I merely wanted your house leveled so that you would understand that I can’t countenance failure. We thought Ms. Renault was in Paris, and that when you returned you would first find her a safe house, and then come here. I don’t want the money returned, it’s yours to keep. But I was hoping to offer you redemption. I still am, if you are willing to lower your weapon and hold out your hand.”

  Wolfhardt was close. DeCamp could almost feel the man’s presence like an approaching low pressure system bringing with it a storm. But Wolfhardt had been one of Sergeant Marks’s sources at the behest of the other source, Abdullah al-Naimi. Money indeed.

  “Who killed her?” he demanded.

  “It wasn’t Gunther himself, if that’s what you thought. He hired a pair of small-time hoods from Marseilles, and when he found out that they’d bungled the job he killed them both. It’s the only blood on his hands.” Anne Marie shrugged. “On my hands, too, I’m willing to admit. But then yours are none too tidy.”