The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  One of its key projects was the Sea Burst, a six-inch guided projectile designed to be fired from the shoulder-mounted Windjammer rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Unlike previous antisubmarine and anti-shipping RPGs, the Sea Burst was a thermonuclear device. At 35 pounds, it was the lightest such device ever designed, packing .009 kilotons of destructive power. By contrast, the “Little Boy” gravity bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had the destructive force of approximately 13 KT of TNT. But “Little Boy” was not a focused explosion. It destroyed buildings across a two-mile diameter. The unleashed shock wave, moving faster than the speed of sound, turned structural debris created by the blast into shrapnel, which extended the field of destruction even farther.

  It was an extremely effective weapon. However, if used in combat against a nearby boat or fleet, the blowback and fallout would not do the parent battleship any good. Even fired from a safe distance at a port city, it would destroy the port and the city both. Such results were not in the navy’s best interests.

  The Sea Burst was designed to surgically obliterate a target with a minimum of collateral radioactive contamination. The delivery system itself had been tested at White Sands with conventional explosions. There were jokes in the bunkers about the comical little “pops” they produced, even though those blasts would be sufficient to punch a hole in 12 inches of alloy steel.

  Brigadier General Arthur Gilbert was United States Army, not navy. But daily top secret briefing memos told him everything that was going on at the installation. He had been following the Sea Burst with particular interest because the applications for portable nuclear grenades impacted all branches of the military. It would enable special ops forces deployed in mountainous regions to employ bunker-busting force, rather than having to call in air raids, during which time their targets could relocate. It could enable a single paratrooper, dropped into a city at night, to take out the entire electrical grid of that city.

  In the wrong hands, however ...

  Interrogations at White Sands typically involved amateur archaeologists looking for shell casings from the Apache war or for mining memorabilia. One woman, the fifty-five-year-old editor of the Canine Defenders of Freedom Web site, was looking for memorabilia from the Range Instrumentation Development Division’s dog program. In the early 1960s, it was necessary for engineers to recover small missile parts to ascertain why tests succeeded or failed. Ground crews would spend hours, sometimes days, recovering this material, which was often buried in the sands by the force of the test. That was before scientists came up with the idea of using canines in the recovery effort. The key missile components were coated with shark-liver oil. Specially trained dogs could smell it from 100 yards away. What took training was not smelling the squalene, but keeping the dogs from running after desert wildlife. The editor was searching for remnants of the terry-cloth jackets worn by the dogs, the pockets of which were stuffed with ice during the summer to keep the dogs from overheating.

  The program was discontinued in 1965, when word got out that the dogs were also being used to recover materials from nuclear testing sites. The United States military went back to sending scientists.

  Like many high-ranking officers, people who had spent their adult lives in uniform, General Gilbert had little use for civilian values and ideology. The inter-service rivalry was intense but, like any tribal organization, they closed ranks when it came to facing outside forces. And for all the value they provided, the American industrialists were a pain. Whatever machismo the individual soldier possessed; whatever alpha-dog qualities an officer developed or had innately; whatever vanity soldiers possessed about their bodies, the press of their uniforms, the medals they displayed, they were patriots first. Even a president could not stand opposed to a unified wall of military will. When the Joint Chiefs wanted surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, they got them. When the United States Central Command wanted to expand operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan, it was done. No president could risk worst-case scenario commencement addresses given by secretaries of defense. No administration wanted dire outcomes whispered in the ears of hawkish senators of its own party.

  Conversely, industrialists all had boards of directors and stockholders. They might be patriots, but they were capitalists first.

  Except for Jacob Trask.

  Gilbert had first met him in the late 1970s, at a conference involving the role of the military in urban security. It wasn’t simply a matter of civil unrest, like the kind that had rocked the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965. It was about the bankruptcy New York City faced and the role technology could play in safeguarding streets with a skeletal police force. Trask had presented a slide show of his company’s plans to adapt discarded U-2 spy plane technology to urban patrols. Gilbert and many others liked the idea, but the ACLU learned of it and pressured Congress not to fund any broad domestic eavesdropping programs.

  “Well, what do you expect?” Trask had said to him during a visit to White Sands with other private-sector captains of industry. “They’re the people who voted to let Reds in the organization.”

  At the time, Gilbert was a liaison between the U.S. Army Command sergeant major Victor Houston and Commander Matt Lewis, deputy for navy of the White Sands Detachment, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division. When Gilbert replaced Houston in 1984, Trask became his go-to advisor on civilian matters. There was not a more passionate American than Trask. His company was privately held, and from Reconstruction to the present day the family business was about making the nation the greatest power, the greatest explorer, the greatest melting pot the globe had ever seen.

  Gilbert trusted Trask. He had never known the industrialist’s honor and duty to be in conflict. Those qualities were not mutually bonded: a soldier could be asked to make an object lesson of a tribal leader by killing him in front of his people. For a civilian, the conflict could appear only in the form of treason. Nine times out of ten, traitors were motivated by money. That was not Jacob Trask.

  But something else was true about Trask. He was a passionate man, especially about his country. He had ramped up the Trask Industries war machine in 2001 to provide ordnance for an attack against the Taliban and, later, for the invasion of Iraq. He did that without firm orders from the Department of Defense and, indeed, ended up producing nothing that could be used for traditional carpet bombing: he had filled the bombs with napalm that was left over from the Persian Gulf War. He did not share the concern of the Bush administration that civilians might be caught in the strategic waste laying of vast stretches of the tribal regions. The loss ran to tens of millions of dollars. He had told Gilbert that was the price of preparedness.

  Gilbert had been impressed by that. Yet today, when they spoke on the way to the office, Trask said nothing about Baltimore. He had been awakened by alerts about New York; Trask hadn’t mentioned that, either. Gilbert’s sole concern was to take these men into custody.

  Gilbert went directly to the interrogation room with the idea that if there was a problem, the problem was with one of the two men—probably both—who were being held in Conference Room B. The innocuous-sounding designation was known internally as the Bastille, since it was soundproofed, wired for video, had a teak door lined with iron mesh, no windows, and could be used to hold a person or persons indefinitely.

  There was an antechamber with a gunmetal desk outside and three computer monitors on it. Two of them were for the cameras located in opposite corners of the square room. Gilbert saw that the men had been given bottled water and nothing more. Audio was streaming through an overhead speaker. The guests were silent. The door to the room was to the right, a guard stationed before it. A pair of naval intelligence officers were manning the computers. From there, they could access civilian and government databases. That information was displayed on the third monitor. Right now it was displaying the motor vehicle data and police records of each man.

  There was one cell phone on the desk.

  “Mr. Jenkins, only one of t
hem had a phone?” Gilbert asked.

  “On him, sir,” the intel officer replied.

  “Nothing was recovered from the vehicle? The GPS?”

  “Those weren’t part of the orders,” Jenkins replied. “Only the recovery of the men.”

  “Brilliant,” Gilbert said.

  “In defense of the team, there was a showdown of sorts with the Texas Highway Patrol. Lieutenant Delguercio thought it best not to let the situation escalate. Marley?”

  “We’ve sent a team back to the vehicle and requisitioned whatever might have been recovered from the vehicle by local authorities,” the other officer said. “I’ll be monitoring that effort.”

  “Who’s going to talk to these men?”

  “Colonel Murray is on her way,” Jenkins said. “Command Sergeant Mintz thought it best to have an African American interrogator on this.”

  As they spoke, the door to the antechamber opened. A young army officer strode in, saluted the brigadier general without stopping, and walked directly to the door of the Bastille. Jenkins buzzed her in.

  “Efficient,” Gilbert said.

  “You don’t know her, sir?”

  “Only by dossier,” he replied.

  It was going to be interesting, Gilbert thought. She would have seen the same data that was on the screen: these guys were clean.

  Those were exactly the kind of men one would want to hire to hijack nuclear weapons.

  Gilbert watched the monitors as Colonel Kathy Murray put her electronic tablet on the table, glanced at it, then regarded the men.

  “Mr. Bell, Mr. Scroggins,” the woman said without preamble, “crates with nuclear materials, earmarked for delivery here by you, are missing. I want to know where they are. Mr. Bell?”

  “Ma’am—”

  “Colonel.”

  He made a gesture of apology. “Colonel, I have no idea what you’re talking about. As I’ve been sayin’ to everyone who has had a hand in putting me here—”

  “Thank you. Mr. Scroggins?”

  The other man regarded her before answering. “I’d like to know who says there were nukes—”

  “I’ll repeat the question if you like.”

  “Colonel, we delivered electronic components,” Scroggins said.

  “The address?”

  “One was to the NYPD Counterterrorism office at 55 Broadway. The other was to an FBI lab at One West Street. Abbie handled the NYPD delivery, then went to get us lunch. I walked the other crates over to One West.”

  She regarded Bell. “Earlier today you ignored an alert from your dispatcher.”

  “It didn’t apply to us,” Bell said. “Because ... we weren’t carrying nukes.”

  “Did you make any stops?”

  “A few rest areas for a few minutes and then at a lodge in Arkadelphia,” Bell said. “You can check the—”

  “We know what to do. Name?”

  “The Arklight Dome Lodge.”

  “How did you disable the tracers?”

  Bell shook his head. “We didn’t. There were no—”

  “Mr. Scroggins?”

  “What Abbie said,” he replied.

  “What do you know about disabling a weapon-specific GPS device ?”

  Scroggins made a face. “I don’t know. You mean, like smashing it with a hammer?”

  “What do you know about disabling a weapon-specific GPS device, Mr. Scroggins?”

  “Shit, Colonel. I know shit about it.”

  “We couldn’t even get to ’em if we wanted to,” Bell said.

  Her dark eyes shifted to him. “Explain.”

  “They told us in orientation that those gadgets get tied to the mechanism, inside. If the primary one isn’t working, the backup one goes on.”

  “When the weapon is turned on,” she clarified.

  “I don’t know about weapons, but for our gadgets, that’s my understanding,” Bell said.

  Gilbert listened with detached interest. Col. Murray was going by the book: fast hits, no backtracking, keep them off balance and carried along by your agenda, not their own. But it wasn’t producing results. General Gilbert already knew that these systems had a backup. They gave you exactly one minute of warm-up before the weapon was fired. That was not a lot of time to prevent it from being used, because that was not the function of the timer. Someone on-site had to target and fire the weapon. The exact location was fluid because of external circumstances, like the repositioning of enemy security, patrols or, in the case of an airfield, the target itself. The idea was that a waiting chopper or vehicle could locate the signal, reposition itself, and get to the shooter in that minute, remove him from immediate-proximity danger. The air-to-ground nuclear rockets had an additional one-minute countdown detonator to give the team extra time before the shock wave or radioactive cloud hit. There was no need for a concussion explosion with a nuke: there was no way anyone at the target could shut it down or contain the blast.

  His gut told him the guys weren’t hiding anything.

  “Call me if something comes up,” Gilbert said.

  “Yes, sir.” Jenkins replied.

  Gilbert left the antechamber and walked to his office. Assuming the two men were telling the truth, he reverse engineered what might have occurred. Someone wanted nukes. Trask wanted to make sure they got them for reasons yet to be determined. The drivers were told they were delivering electronic devices. What if that information were false? What if someone at Trask—not the Shotgun—had disconnected the GPS devices on the Sea Burst prototypes? Fewer people would have to be involved with stealing two hot devices than with arming two “dummy” devices to make them hot.

  But what about the missing inventory alert?

  Was that an oversight, a screwup that some in-house nuke-stealing son of a bitch was supposed to have covered? Or hadn’t it been worth the bother? The loss of the nukes would have been discovered when the van got to White Sands in another day or so. The drivers would have been blamed, interrogated, and would have said exactly what they were saying now.

  But what if “tomorrow” had been too late to take any action? What if someone was planning to transport—or worse, use—the nukes before then?

  Had the nukes even been on the van, or was that a misdirection, as well? Were they going to be used in Atlanta? Were they in somebody’s van, headed for Washington D.C.?

  The devil’s advocacy was starting fires of suspicion rather than dousing them. As soon as he reached his office, Gilbert called Trask on his private line. The call was sent to the industrialist’s voice mail.

  Gilbert hung up without leaving a message.

  It was then that he allowed himself to contemplate something that made his gut burn. It was something about which studies had been conducted and white papers written: what if someone on the civilian side of things decided to use their military wherewithal to start or assemble an underground army, like al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, only with a great deal of money and a solid command structure? Was that what this was? The first major weapons delivery to a nonnational source?

  Unless Trask talked to him, there was no way Gilbert could find that out. The only military oversight of the industrial, civilian world was what the industrial, civilian world allowed. He couldn’t even authorize an examination of the crates that were delivered to the two New York addresses: he would have to pass that information along to local law enforcement.

  For the first time in his life, Brigadier General Arthur Gilbert wished to hell he was dead wrong about something. But all of that wouldn’t change the fact that for whatever reason, there were two nuclear weapons that could not be accounted for.

  CHAPTER 29

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Kealey did not have to study the scene to know that the situation was not contained and far from over.

  He took it in at a glance, saw that the weapon the dead man carried was not the same that had been used for the Penn Station and Brooklyn Bridge shootings. He left the terminal and hurried along Forty-Second Street a
s he called Andrews.

  “We just heard about—”

  “It’s a sideshow,” Kealey told him. “Different gunman. I’m heading back to Grand Central.”

  “Do you have any information about—”

  “Zip,” Kealey said. “But I can’t think of anywhere else she’d go. Make sure someone tells the cops there not to stand down. There’s still a potential risk from the original shooter.”

  Kealey waited while Andrews informed the president and the others, put the information out there. He was alarmed at how many people were being funneled along this one route—and he was still five avenues away. Vehicular traffic was down to a single lane as pedestrians clogged the streets.

  It was a shooting gallery.

  As he waited for Andrews to get back on, Kealey thought about the attacks this morning. Something was not making sense. Why would the enemy use a skilled killer for two attacks, drop in a ringer, then pick up again with the pro? Why sacrifice the Port Authority killer to take a sniper off the radar—and then put her back on again?

  You wouldn’t, he thought. You’d take the opportunity to get her out with the crush of commuters. Send her somewhere else.

  Or put her on another project. The one she had really been freed to undertake. The one that not just any adequate marksman could pull off.

  Kealey slowed.

  What the hell are they planning?

  When Andrews came back on, Kealey shared the thought with him.