“Best recommendation as to method, Mr. Brinks?” Vice President Sandecker asked.
“Advise we take out the rigs, Mr. Vice President,” Brinks said. “That’ll effectively shut off the power. And without power, the particle accelerator is just a big tunnel with a lot of fancy equipment stored inside.”
Though Pitt didn’t like Brinks’s jaunty tone, he calculated the situation similarly. A threat existed, controlled by a leader who appeared to be unstable. An airstrike would create minimal destruction, minimal casualties. The technology would be preserved for study.
Much to Pitt’s dislike, he had to agree with Brinks’s assessment.
“I’ll relay your recommendation to the President,” Sandecker said, then stood.
Meetings like this didn’t often last long. And even if it was going to continue, the VP had seen enough.
But before he could leave, something odd happened to the screen at the front of the room. The colors shifted for a second and then bled, like something was interfering with the signal.
All eyes focused on it.
Brinks looked to his assistant. “What’s going on?”
The assistant was tapping away at a laptop. He looked up, shaking his head.
A second later a flare of white light crossed the screen and then everything went dark. Static followed and then a blank screen. Text in the bottom right-hand corner indicated complete signal loss.
Brinks looked embarrassed. “Get on the horn and find out what happened to the feed.”
“The line’s clean,” the assistant said. “The signal’s coming through fine. It’s just not carrying any data.”
Pitt had been watching something odd on the screen right before it flared. He doubted anyone else had noticed as the VP was leaving. When Sandecker stood, everyone else stood, Pitt as well, but he’d never taken his eyes off the screen.
That allowed him to see a number indicating heat output from the oil platforms suddenly rising. It had climbed rapidly, like an odometer rolling over. A new area of red and magenta had appeared over one of the angled filaments. It had been visible for only a second, but Pitt was fairly certain he knew what it was.
Somewhere in Fort Meade the techs probably knew too; they just were too stunned to say so until they’d checked every other possibility.
“The problem’s not the computer,” Pitt announced. “It’s your satellite.”
All eyes turned to him.
“Really?” Brinks said. “And when did you become an expert in remote imaging diagnostics?”
“I’m not,” Pitt said. “But play the last five seconds back. You’ll see an energy spike right before the image flared. They fried your satellite, Brinks. It’s gone.”
Brinks looked over at his assistant. “We’re trying to reestablish a link,” he said.
“Forget it,” Pitt told him. “You’re calling up a dead bird.”
“Switch to Keyhole Bravo,” Brinks said, referencing the backup satellite that was orbiting at a different angle and higher altitude.
Brinks’s assistant finished his last desperate act of tapping and looked up. There was nothing to say.
“Two satellites gone,” Sandecker said. “That’s a damn act of war.”
Everyone in the room grew more somber at that realization.
“I figured you’d be happy,” Pitt said to Brinks. “This proves your theory. Djemma Garand is dangerous, his weapon is operational, and he’s not afraid to use it. Even I agree with you now. He has to be taken out.”
49
Somewhere over the Atlantic, July 7
KURT AUSTIN AND JOE ZAVALA found themselves in the noisy cockpit of a Russian-designed IL-76 transport as it cruised at thirty-four thousand feet. They sat in the jump seats, just behind the pilots. They wore headsets and flight suits and stared through the windshield at a brilliant sunset out over the Atlantic.
After leaving Singapore, they’d spent several days rounding up the equipment Kurt felt he needed to get aboard the Onyx. The last piece of the puzzle had been a jet capable of a transatlantic hop, piloted by a few people that would ask no questions.
They’d chartered it out of Tangiers, through a somewhat murky chain of brokers that began with an Egyptian friend of Joe’s, who knew a man from Greece, who had good contacts with a few people in Morocco.
While the chain of command worried Kurt a bit, the aging craft they were flying in was even more concerning. It shook and rattled and smelled as if it were leaking jet fuel in half a dozen places. The pilots tapped hard on the old analog-style gauges as if they weren’t working, fiddled with a pair of fuses at one point, and chatted in English with an Eastern European accent, making constant references to the “worthless mechanics.”
So far, the wings hadn’t fallen off. Kurt considered that a small victory.
As he pondered whether their luck would hold, the copilot turned to him.
“Radio call for you,” he said. “Switch to channel two on headset.”
Kurt looked over at the toggle switch beside the headset jack. Cyrillic writing and the numbers 1 and 2 presented themselves. He flipped the switch to number 2.
“This is Kurt,” he said.
“You’re a damn hard person to find, Kurt.” It was the voice of Dirk Pitt. “If it wasn’t for a rather large item on your NUMA credit line regarding an aircraft charter, I wouldn’t have been able to track you down.”
“Um, yeah,” Kurt mumbled. “I can explain that.”
He tapped the copilot on the shoulder.
“Is this line secure?” Kurt asked.
The copilot nodded. “It’s a proprietary channel. Scrambled until it reaches plane.” He smiled, a large mustache turning up with the corners of his mouth. “All part of our service to you.”
Kurt almost laughed. Not exactly the cone of silence, he thought, but it would have to do.
“I think we’re onto something,” he said, wishing he had been able to have this conversation after he’d confirmed the accuracy of that particular thought. “I think we’ve found our man.”
“Where?” Dirk asked.
“On a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.”
“Then why are you airborne?”
Kurt gazed out the window. The sun was about to drop below the horizon ahead of them. The moment of truth was still two hours away.
“It’s the only way to get close enough,” he said. “The ship we think he’s on is sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, making a few knots and pretty much going nowhere. The problem is, it’s a hundred miles from the nearest shipping lane in a barren spot in the middle of the ocean. Approaching it on the water would be a dead giveaway — with emphasis on the word dead. Our only hope is an airdrop.”
Dirk went silent, perhaps evaluating his employee for bravery or maybe a Section Eight.
“I’m sure they have radar,” Pitt said finally. “I take it you’re not going to fly overhead and jump.”
“No, sir,” Kurt said.
“Okay,” Dirk replied, obviously aware of what Kurt was planning. “That explains the second item on your account.”
“I made sure to get receipts,” Kurt insisted, as if it mattered.
“We’ll talk about that later,” Dirk said. “The thing is, I don’t believe you need to make this jump.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say we’ve confirmed our primary target as lying elsewhere,” Dirk said. “Unfortunately, we’ve already sparred with them once today and we lost that round. Brinks was right, your man is nothing more than a hired hand. He delivered his hostages and took off. While there’s some value in locating him, I wouldn’t risk your life over it.”
Kurt considered what Pitt was telling him. The brass all assumed Andras was a soldier of fortune, and why not? That’s what he’d always been. It seemed they thought his part in this was over and that he was on his way to a vacation or another job.
Maybe they would pick him up later, maybe they wouldn’t, but if Kurt understood what he wa
s being told, they’d confirmed Sierra Leone was the sponsor of all this madness.
“Why don’t you just sit this one out?” Dirk added.
“You know I would,” Kurt said, “but something is still bothering me. Our target is not acting like a mercenary. More like it’s his party. I’m not sure what it all means, but I swear there’s more to this than we know.”
He glanced over at Joe. “On top of that, Mr. Zavala says there’s a lot about this tanker that doesn’t add up. For one thing, she’s forty feet wider than most tankers her length, which gives her a kind of stubby appearance even though she’s twelve hundred feet long. She also has odd bulges protruding near the bow underneath the forward anchors, and a raised section amidships. We have no idea what any of it is for, but neither one of us likes it. If it’s all the same with you, I’d just as soon get a closer look at her.”
“You’ve earned the right to make this call,” Pitt said. “Just be sure you’re making it for the right reason.”
“I’m not trying to be a hero,” Kurt said. “If there’s nothing interesting down there, I’ll go over the side, pop the cork on my survival raft, and wait for you to send a blonde, brunette, and a redhead to pick me up. But on the odd chance Joe and I are right, better we find out now rather than later.”
Pitt was quiet. “Okay,” he said finally. “Don’t get yourself blown up before I can yell at you for all these bills that are coming in.”
Kurt laughed. “I’ll try not to.”
With that, Pitt signed off. Kurt gazed ahead at the orange ball of the sun just dipping below the horizon. The truth lay eight hundred miles ahead, moving slowly through the dark of night.
50
TWO HOURS LATER, still on the old jet, Kurt and Joe had moved from the cockpit back into main section of the fuselage. They now stood in a cavern of metal, surrounded by equipment, small containers, and tie-down straps.
Despite a pressure suit, gloves, boots, and fighter pilot — style helmets with noise-canceling headphones and forced oxygen, Kurt could feel the bite of the frigid cold at thirty-five thousand feet. He could feel every shudder of the aircraft and hear nothing but the piercing whine of the jet’s narrow seventies-era engines.
Such were the accommodations in the cargo bay of a Russian transport.
Standing beside him, in a parka with fur lining around the face and a headset and oxygen mask of his own, Joe Zavala appeared to be saying something, but Kurt couldn’t make out the words.
“I didn’t copy,” Kurt shouted.
Joe pressed his oxygen mask and its microphone tighter on his face and repeated his thought. “I said, you must be crazy,” he shouted back.
Kurt didn’t respond. He was beginning to think Joe might be right. Holding firmly to a strap that dangled from the side of the airframe like a man on a crowded subway, Kurt turned toward the aircraft’s tail. A crack began appearing near the rear as the ramp in the tail opened.
As the ramp went down, the old jet shook worse than ever, and the wind swirled through the cargo bay, buffeting him and Joe and threatening to knock them over.
The aircraft had been depressurized thirty minutes before, so there was no rush of escaping atmosphere, but the temperature instantly dropped from just above freezing to fifteen below, and the howling of the jet’s engines jumped four notches at the very least.
Kurt stared out the yawing opening into the waiting blackness of the night sky. He was sucking oxygen off a tank and wearing a specially designed parachute. And while he’d made over two hundred jumps in his lifetime, including twenty HALOs (High Altitude — Low Opening), what he was about to try was something he’d never done before, something Joe had been continuously advising him to rethink.
So far, he’d laughed off Joe’s pessimism, calling him a “mother hen,” but now, staring out the back of the jet, Kurt wasn’t so sure.
Letting go of the strap, he stepped cautiously toward an object near the open tail ramp. It looked like a cross between an Olympic bobsled and a “photon torpedo” from the Star Trek series. The designers called it a Single Occupant Tactical Range Insertion Unit. The men who’d tested it out called it the LX, or Lunatic Express.
It worked like a one-man glider. Dropped from seven miles in the sky with a glide ratio of twenty to one, the Lunatic Express could transport its occupant on a one-way trip across a hundred forty miles and do it without a sound or a heat trail or a radar signature, since the whole thing was actually made of specialized plastic and covered with a radar-absorbing layer that looked and felt like soft tire rubber to Kurt.
To fly it, the occupant climbed in, lay down face-first, and grabbed a pair of handles that did not seem too far removed from the grips of an old ten-speed bicycle. He then jammed his feet into what felt like ski bindings.
The most-forward section of the device was a clear Plexiglas windshield with a basic heads-up display projected on it. It gave him speed, altitude, heading, glide ratio, and rate of descent. It also offered a visual glide-slope indicator designed to help the pilot maintain the correct angle and reach whatever destination had been targeted. In this case, that meant the tanker Onyx, seventy-five miles away.
Because of her odd position in the ocean, the Onyx had proved hard to get to. Not only was she far away from the closest shipping lane, there were no air routes anywhere close to her. To fly overhead, even at thirty-five thousand feet, would have been instantly suspicious, but there was a heavily traveled air route seventy-five miles to the south, and on radar the IL-76 would appear as just another passenger jet on the airborne highway. Kurt couldn’t imagine it being worth a second look.
And even if they were watching, no system Kurt knew of would pick up the glider and its single occupant.
It was a simple setup in theory. In the simulator Kurt had felt like he was playing a video game. Somehow the real thing was slightly more intimidating.
“Come on,” he said to Joe. “Get me into this thing before I chicken out.”
Joe moved up to the glider. “Do you have any idea how many things could go wrong with your plan?”
“No,” Kurt said. “And I don’t want you to tell me.”
“The launch could go bad, you could get ripped up by the jet’s wake turbulence, your oxygen could fail, which means you’ll pass out before you can even get down to a safe altitude…”
Kurt looked up. “What did I just say?”
“… You could freeze to death,” Joe continued, ignoring him. “You could be unable to release the cover or pop your chute. Your feet could get stuck. The airfoils could fail to open correctly.”
Kurt climbed over the rail and into the torpedo-shaped glider, giving up on stopping Joe.
“What about you?” he asked. “You have to stay on this contraption. Did you see the corrosion near the wing root? Did you see that smoke pouring from the number three engine when they all were fired up? I can’t believe this old bird even got up into the air.”
“All part of the Aeroflot experience,” Joe insisted. “Not that I wouldn’t rather be flying American-made, but I think she’s safer than what you’re about to do.”
Kurt wanted to disagree, but he couldn’t. In truth, he believed the transport was safe, even if it shook and rattled and whined like a banshee. But if Joe was going to make him sweat, he was going to return the favor.
“And don’t forget the pilots,” Kurt added. “I think I saw them doing shots of sake kamikaze style right before we took off.”
Joe laughed. “Yeah, in your honor, amigo.”
A yellow light came on. One minute to the jump site.
Kurt locked his feet in, lay down flat, and switched on the video display. As it initialized, he gave the thumbs-up to Joe, who snapped the thin cowling over Kurt’s back, covering him and his specially designed parachute.
A second yellow light came on, and a red light began to flash. Thirty seconds.
Joe moved back out of Kurt’s view and toward the launch control.
A few seconds
later Kurt heard Joe counting down—“Tres… Dos… Uno”—and then with great enthusiasm, “¡Vámonos, mi amigo!”
Kurt felt the glider accelerate backward as a powered conveyer belt sped him toward the back end of the plane. And then he dropped, and was slammed back even harder as the torpedo-shaped glider hit the 500-knot airstream.
Seconds later, a tiny drogue chute deployed behind the glider, and the g-forces from the deceleration hit Kurt as hard as a launch from a carrier deck, but in the opposite way.
The restraint harness crushed Kurt’s shoulders as he slid forward. His arms bent, and his hands bore the rest of his weight, and all the while his eyes felt like they might pop out of his head.
It went like that for a good ten seconds before the deceleration slowed.
Once he got his body stabilized, Kurt scanned the heads-up display. “Four hundred,” Kurt called out to no one but himself. A few seconds later, “Three-fifty…”
The glider slowed and dropped, heading toward the waters of the central Atlantic like a giant artillery shell or a manned bomb. Finally, as the speed dropped below 210 knots, Kurt released the chute.
It broke away with a resounding clang, and the descent went from a shaky violent ride to an unnervingly smooth one. The whistling wind was almost completely blocked out by his helmet, and the buffeting was all but gone.
A moment later, as the airspeed hit 190, a pair of stubby wings extended, forced outward by a powered screw jack.
This was the most dangerous moment of the flight, in Kurt’s mind. Prototypes had been lost when the wings did not extend evenly, causing the glider to spin out of control and break apart.
True, he still had a parachute on if that happened, but there was no telling what it might do to his body if the vehicle began to spin out of control or came apart in midair at nearly 200 knots.
The wings locked into place, accompanied by tremendous pressure on Kurt’s chest and stomach, as the glider developed lift and transformed itself from a manned missile on a downward-sloping trajectory to an aircraft pulling up and then flying almost straight and level.
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