‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the guy growled. ‘And you people just fucked yourselves by coming in here like this. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.’
‘I think these fellas are a wee bit uptight,’ Boonzie said.
‘Looks like it to me,’ Ben said. ‘How about a drink to loosen things up?’ He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a quart vodka bottle. Unscrewing the cap, he stepped up to the three men as if to offer it to them.
‘You’re fucking nuts,’ said the burly guy, but his tone changed to a squeal of fear as Ben upended the bottle and poured a third of its contents over his head. He did the same for the other two, then tossed the empty bottle away. The men blinked and gasped and shook their heads furiously. The sharp tang of gasoline filled the office.
‘I’m not one for barbaric tactics,’ Quigley said. ‘But my friend here,’ – pointing at Ben – ‘he’s another matter. Once he gets started I really don’t think I’ll be able to call him off. And he always keeps his promises. I’d urge you to bear that in mind.’
‘Still don’t know what we’re talking about?’ Jeff said.
From his other pocket Ben drew out a fresh pack of Gauloises. It wasn’t an easy brand to find in Jakarta, London or New York City. Without a word he peeled off the plastic wrapper, flicked it away, opened the pack, took one out, slipped it between his lips and then clanged open his shiny brand-new Zippo to light it with. The cigarette’s tip glowed brightly as he sucked in smoke.
He wasn’t here to waste time on words. He blew out the smoke and said to the men, ‘I’m going to count to five. Then I’m going to burn you.’
Instant panic. The men kicked and struggled in their chairs, rocking from side to side.
‘One,’ Ben said.
‘Here’s where we’re at,’ Quigley told the three gibbering, gasoline-soaked men. ‘We’re not idiots, so we figure Triton is the name of one of Mandrake Holdings’ shipping fleet. Except it doesn’t appear on any register. That’s where you guys come in.’
‘Two,’ Ben said.
‘You’re going to assist our inquiry by telling us all about that ship,’ Quigley said. ‘Registration number, tonnage, personnel, cargo, every last detail. You’re going to show us all your secret computer records, files, the works. You’re also going to oblige us by saying whether there’s a certain gentleman by the name of Victor Craine on board. You might know him better as the Director.’
‘Three,’ Ben said.
‘Additionally, you’re going to tell us the Triton’s destination and its exact current position and radio frequency,’ Quigley said. ‘Then we want to know the precise nature of the relationship between this company and the Nemesis Program. Names. Details. Dates and numbers. If that’s too much to ask, then too bad for you. Out of my hands.’
The three men couldn’t take their terrified eyes off Ben. The air-conditioned office was pleasantly cool but the sweat was pouring off their faces.
‘Four,’ Ben said. He sucked on the cigarette, making it burn hard. Took it from his lips.
‘Barbeque time,’ Boonzie said with a sadistic grin.
All three of the men broke more or less at the same instant, as Ben stepped up to them with the cigarette and was just about to toss it. ‘All right! All right!’ the one in the middle bawled. ‘Don’t burn us! I can tell you what you want to know! Just for the love of God, don’t burn us! Please!’
‘Sounds like cooperation,’ Jeff said. ‘That’s what we like, isn’t it?’
‘We like it a lot,’ Ben said. He put the cigarette back in his mouth and stepped back.
‘Pity,’ Boonzie said. ‘I was hopin’ they wouldnae talk.’
Quigley took a small digital recorder from his pocket and switched it on. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The floor is yours. Let’s have it.’
Twenty-six minutes later, the four left the Mandrake Holdings building and headed eastwards back down Fulton Street to where the black Lincoln Town Car was parked. Ben bleeped the locks and took the wheel, Quigley up front next to him, Boonzie and Jeff in the back. Ben gunned the engine and took off with a squeal into the traffic.
‘Just one question. Would you really have burned those guys?’ Quigley asked Ben.
Ben didn’t take his eyes off the road. ‘What do you think?’
They drove several blocks and stopped outside a bar. The four of them got out and walked calmly inside. Music was playing in the background. Quigley and Jeff ordered beer. Boonzie had a taste for wine these days. Ben got a whisky, double malt, no ice. They took a table in the corner and drank in silence.
‘So now we know what’s involved,’ Ben said after a few minutes. ‘Anyone who wants to walk away now, say so. No hard feelings.’
‘Hell with that,’ Quigley said. ‘You know where I stand.’
‘Same here,’ Jeff muttered. ‘All the way.’
Boonzie didn’t need to say a word, as the look of quiet ferocity on his craggy face said it for him.
Ben nodded. He drained the last of his whisky and clapped the empty glass on the tabletop.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and sink a ship.’
Chapter Sixty-Three
Nine days later
Dawn was still some time away as the VLCS-class container ship Triton ploughed through the dark, choppy waters of the Gulf of Finland, the easternmost stretch of the Baltic Sea that cut two hundred and fifty miles between the coasts of Finland to the north and Estonia to the south, as far as the Russian city and port of Saint Petersburg to the east.
Measuring over a thousand feet from prow to stern, the ship’s immense deck and holds were heavily laden with cargo. The towering prow pushed through the water at a steady twenty-five knots. Behind, the massive diesel-powered screws churned up a long, curving wake against the dark water. Every now and then another large ship would pass by on its passage from one Baltic port to another. But even though the Triton might look just the same as any vessel of her class, she was carrying a cargo no other ship in the world could boast of.
Ostensibly, for the benefit of any coast guard or customs officials who might want to come aboard for inspection, the stacks of containers lining her vast deck and the gigantic warehouse that was her hold were filled with raw industrial materials, all fully documented and accounted for. The real cargo was in a sealed-off section deep in the bowels of the ship, heavily guarded by armed personnel, virtually none of whom had any idea of its true nature.
High above the darkened deck and the helipad on which stood his personal helicopter, Victor Craine supported himself on his two sticks and gazed eastwards from the bridge to where the sun would soon be rising on the horizon. The Director liked to come up and refresh his lungs with some sea air now and again, even though it was cold in these waters and the chill seemed to pierce through to his frail old bones. He spent most of his time down below in the ship’s command centre, a suite of plush, electronics-crammed offices that nobody would have guessed could be found on board such an outwardly crusty old vessel. In fact Victor Craine’s mobile base, the true beating heart of the Nemesis Program, was home to an array of computer technology that could easily rival his land base deep within the corridors of the Pentagon.
Sensing a presence, Craine turned to see his aide Isaac Friedkin approaching. He was carrying a fine china cup and saucer on a tray. ‘Your cocoa, sir.’
The old man hooked his ebony walking stick over a rail, leaned more weight on the ivory stick and took the steaming cup without a word. Plenty of cream, a good sprinkling of cinnamon. At one time he’d enjoyed a dash of green Chartreuse in his chocolate, but his slowly failing liver forced him to forgo that little pleasure nowadays.
‘We’ll soon be commencing initial targeting sequence, sir,’ Friedkin informed him.
‘I’ll be below directly,’ Craine said. ‘Leave me now.’
He took his time finishing his cocoa and watched the very first red glow of dawn begin to creep into the sky ahead. Then with a final gl
ance at the sea, he gathered up his sticks and started making his scraping, limping way below. He might not have looked it, but he was excited. The next few hours would be as decisive a moment in his career as he could remember since those heady long-ago days when, as a CIA counterintelligence chief, he’d locked horns with his opposite number in the KGB in a deadly game of subterfuge and assassination.
The anonymity of Craine’s work was second nature to him after fifty years, and there was no room in this business for ego; yet there were moments when he privately regretted that the crowning glory of his professional life, the ultra-classified development program that he’d nurtured and overseen all these years, had given the name ‘Nemesis’ and was now about to see fulfil its true purpose, was something he was unable openly to claim the credit for. The pivotal moment in world history that was soon to take place never would, never could, feature in his official list of achievements. Shame.
Because everything else up until now had just been an exploratory foray into Nemesis’ outstanding capabilities, a destructive power that far outstripped even the wildest imaginings of its original pioneer Nikola Tesla and sometimes even frightened Victor Craine himself. This was indeed, as the now-departed Dr Roberta Ryder had put it, ‘the big one’. When it was over, Craine knew, the program would have to be decommissioned for a while. It was a technology that for political reasons couldn’t be overused, however strong the temptation. Not even the power of the world media – and few people knew better than Victor Craine how readily it could be manipulated – would be able to cover up the fact that too many hugely publicised disasters, one after the other, conveniently targeted to suit the secret political agenda, might appear more than coincidental and inflame the conspiracy pundits.
So, after this one, the Director was going to have to put his pride and joy aside and turn his attention to other matters – such as tracking down and properly eliminating the last few remnants of the opposition. Hope and Ryder were dead, along with the unfortunate Jack Quigley of CIA, the whistle-blowers Shelton and Blumenthal, the journalist Guardini and of course the Pommier woman in Paris. But there were still a few lesser players to be quietly pruned. His own agent Gunnar Frisk, aka Daniel Lund, would have been one of those deemed to know too much, and if the late Major Hope hadn’t kindly done the work for him, he would have been on Victor Craine’s own list of loose ends to tie up. Fabien De Bourg, the ex-boyfriend of the Pommier woman, was another potential threat. His elimination would be a simple matter of staging a drink-driving incident. And on it would go, in the nature of these things, until every conceivable tie to Craine’s precious Nemesis Program had been snipped.
Politics was a wonderful thing, the old man mused to himself on his way below decks, his sticks clicking on metal floors and steps as he went.
Deep below, guards flanked the security doors leading through to the command centre. A few faces glanced up from computer terminals as the Director entered, but most of the personnel were too busy or too intimidated to take their eyes off their work. The place was a bustle of activity in the lead up to the climactic moment that had cost billions of dollars to orchestrate.
Craine walked through into the main control room, his personal domain into which only his closest aides were allowed to venture. Behind the many screens glistened the dark hardwood panelling that clad the walls. More computer equipment smothered the length of a large table. Glenn Gould played Bach in the background. The old man parked his sticks by the large reclining leather chair and writhed himself into it. His legs were aching badly today. Let them hurt all they wanted – he really didn’t care.
The command centre was the brain of the Nemesis weapon. The device itself, now into its twenty-seventh generation of development since Craine had taken over the Program in 1982, was housed in a special section of the hold inside a purpose-built container to protect the ship’s personnel from radiation and surrounded by the high-tensile cables that fed it with the enormous amount of power that it needed when operating at full thrust. The days of tiny steam pistons were long gone.
Nemesis wasn’t the only Tesla-derived technology that the US government had been working on since 1943, but it was by far the most secret. Unlike the HAARP facility in Alaska that directed radio frequency radiation at the ionosphere for – as its developers claimed – the purposes of communications and anti-missile technology, the Nemesis device delivered a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam directly at a specific ground target. The core of the system was the DARPA-designed computer targeting software that interacted with satellite technology to direct its electromagnetic pulse to any set of geographical coordinates fed into the central processor.
In its earlier stages of development they’d experienced the same accuracy problems that Tesla had encountered when he’d mistakenly fired his energy beam at Siberia, accidentally causing the 1908 Tunguska incident while aiming towards the North Pole. Likewise, the first attempts to operate Nemesis had resulted in the destructive energies being directed as much as two hundred miles off course.
Even now, the technology to deliver the weapon’s potential with pinpoint accuracy from one side of the world to the other simply wasn’t there yet, but the technicians were confident that it would be within two years, maybe even sooner. Then the Program could operate from a fixed base. Craine hoped he’d live long enough to see Nemesis operating from the secret silo currently being built for it, deep in the Nevada Desert.
In the meantime, the system was capable of focusing on a target as small as a house from up to six hundred miles away. The short range limitations had posed a major dilemma, with the feasibility of the entire project in doubt until Craine himself had proposed the idea of creating a mobile base for the weapon aboard a suitably-modified cargo vessel able to transport it wherever they wanted.
So had been born the very special relationship between Craine’s secretive little corner of the Pentagon and Mandrake Holdings, one of the Americas’ largest shipping conglomerates. Half a billion dollars had been spent converting the Triton into the ocean-going battery of almost limitless power that it was today. Not a single artillery piece on board, yet Craine’s brainchild was capable of destroying an entire fleet of battleships literally at the touch of a button, or unleashing terrible destruction on virtually any terrestrial target on the planet.
Decades of honing had produced an operating system that even the Director, with no patience or tolerance for newfangled electronics, could work. All that was required was to key in the target coordinates, even just an ordinary postal code in the country of choice, and hit enter. The brain instantly liaised with its own satellite and the target was pinpointed within seconds. Then the operator need simply arm the trigger, which was based on the same design as the firing mechanism for a nuclear missile. A special key, of which Victor Craine possessed two of only three made, opened the bulletproof glass housing to reveal the large red button that he insisted nobody could touch but him.
The red button initiated the final awe-inspiring sequence. The ship’s lights would dim as the Nemesis device sucked in gigantic wattages of power from the generators. The vessel would begin to tremble and hum. After exactly two hundred and forty seconds, the vast energy was released in a single pulse towards the designated target. Faraway, all hell would break loose. By the time the geophysical effects manifested themselves, the Nemesis device would have fallen dormant again, its power surge spent. That meant it was technologically impossible to trace any electromagnetic link between the ship and the affected location anywhere within a six-hundred-mile range, covering a circle up to nearly two thousand square miles in area with Craine’s anonymous vessel hidden away at its centre.
In other words, the concept was foolproof. Never before had a weapon system been so covert and yet so incredibly destructive. The feeling of power and achievement it gave Victor Craine was tremendous. From his chair in the luxurious main control room he could watch the spectacle unfold as the targeting satellite beamed down live images of the des
truction. The Indonesia mission had been one of their most rewarding operations yet – the complex mathematics and physics of generating just the right frequency of tremor to set off the tsunami had kept his scientists working day and night for weeks to crack.
To say it had been worth it was an understatement. With the Triton anchored safely out of range, Craine had been as transfixed as anyone else in the command centre at the sight of the giant wave descending on the Sumatra coastline and engulfing everything in its path. Politically, it was of minor importance except that it kept the topic of climate change high on the agenda, where the economists liked it. Technologically, though, it had been a landmark moment, the first time they’d managed to overcome the difficulties of striking at the ocean bed with such successful results.
Today’s designated target was a much simpler matter. Everything had been leading up to this moment, one for which Victor Craine had been personally waiting for decades. The ridiculous simplicity of being able to achieve it at the mere press of a red button almost made him want to laugh for sheer pleasure. Almost; the old man hadn’t laughed out loud in thirty years. But maybe today he would.
He gazed around him at the multiple screens and monitors that filled the room. The largest was his operations map, displaying a flashing red circle over the target area. Others displayed technical readouts, targeting coordinates, the ship’s GPS position, various satellite images, live camera feed of the Triton’s deck and the slowly lightening grey sea beyond.
‘How are we doing, Friedkin?’ he asked his aide, who was working at a terminal across the room.
‘The target will be within range inside the hour,’ Friedkin said.
The old man nodded with quiet satisfaction and went on gazing at the map screen, thinking about what was going to happen. Devastation on an unprecedented scale. Perhaps a million lives about to be snuffed out, at a conservative estimate. The military strike of the millennium, without a single soldier involved or a single shot fired. And nobody to blame it on.
The Nemesis Program Page 34