"Maybe I thought I was doing the right thing," she continued. "I chose love this time around, but I've seen your record, Mack, and I think it's possible that this mistake is far larger than the last one."
He looked hard at her. "Don't believe everything you read."
They drove north, Bolan trying to digest the information that Julie had given him. He understood her predicament with the Company. Covert operations always carry the possibility of wrongdoing justified as a means to a noble end. Once the morality and ethics of the system were disregarded in covert operations, then anything became justifiable and everything became confused. It was a problem that veterans seasoned a lot harder than Julie had a tough time with. And he'd seen more than one man turn bad because of it.
They exited the highway at Orlovista, heading west, Bolan keeping an eye on the street signs in order to make the turnoff. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 6:30. The three-hour time lost on the flight back was critical.
"What makes you think that Robbie won't still be at the institute?" she asked.
"I called from the airport, and he'd already left for the day. I lifted everyone's address from the files while I was there, so hopefully, we'll catch him at home."
When they reached the intersection of Orlovista and Greenview Drive, Bolan took a left, then proceeded slowly down the tree-lined avenue. He stopped before a squared-off, flat-roofed building that looked like a miniature prison.
"Julie..."
"No," she interrupted, "I won't stay here."
The warrior shrugged, and they got out of the car. He briefly considered sneaking up on the place, but somehow Robbie didn't seem dangerous to that extent. He decided to walk right up to the front door and knock.
They passed through a bricked courtyard blazing with summer flowers, a well-kept place cared for by someone who intended to stay here. As usual, Robbie was an enigma.
Bolan rang the bell, and Robbie Hampton, dressed in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, opened the door. A can of beer was in his hand.
"David!" he said in surprise. "How wonderful to see you!"
"The name's Bolan." The big man pushed past Robbie and walked into his living room, Julie right on his heels. "Nice place you've got here."
"Thanks. With just me to care for, I'm able to indulge myself exclusively. You must be Mrs. Sparks, er, Bolan."
"The name's Julie Arnold, though I was Bernice Sparks for a little while."
"Can I offer either of you a drink? This is all so confusing, I…"
"Quiet," Bolan said tersely. "Sit down."
"I don't…"
"Now," Bolan interrupted. He pulled Big Thunder out of his webbing and laid it on a coffee table, which was a highly polished slab of wood. He sat on the sofa.
Robbie's face darkened. He took an easy chair across from the sofa. The place was tastefully decorated, various writing awards Robbie had won hanging on the wall. As in the man's office, incredible stacks of books tilled wall-to- wall cases, as well as being piled around the room indiscriminately.
"So it's true what they said about you," Robbie said, taking a sip of his beer.
"What was that?" Julie asked.
"That he went crazy in his lab, killed people, caused havoc. There was so much damage up on Five, that they've simply shut it down. They transferred me to Four."
Julie looked at Bolan, her face tense.
Bolan looked at his watch again. There wasn't any time to play games with the man. He picked up the AutoMag and pointed it at Hampton. "You're going to tell me now about who you report to and everything you know about Project GOG."
Hampton's eyes opened wide. "I don't underst…"
Bolan fired once, a large ceramic lamp on the end table next to the man exploding, pieces flying everywhere.
"A-a-ah!" Robbie yelled, grabbing his temple, blood welling up between his fingers from ceramic shrapnel.
"Mack..." Julie pleaded, face drawn.
"If you don't like it, don't look." Bolan swung the gun back to Hampton. "Believe me, Robbie. If I don't get answers quick, you're a dead man where you sit.”
The man put out his hands. "All right. But I don't see what all the fuss is about."
"Just say it."
"I report to the Air Force….I think that GOG is probably the project name under which I'm filed."
"What do you report?"
"Everything that goes on up on the fifth floor. Sometimes, as you know, researchers get cold feet about sharing...."
"We've already talked about that," Bolan said. "Give me more."
"Jerry Butler was working on something big, something the Air Force wanted desperately. When it looked like he wasn't going to come through with the information, I got it for them. When you came along, I watched you, too. I was sure you were there to check up on Butler, so I fed you bits of information about him. When I saw your reaction to the news about Jerry's code, I was sure. I called and told them you were onto something, and I guess I was right."
"Why did the Air Force want Butler's project so much?"
Robbie took another sip of beer, then set down his can amid the rubble on the end table. "I think it was part of the hypothesis... the scenario."
"What scenario?"
"The takeover scenario."
"More," Bolan demanded.
"This goes back a few years, probably six or seven. I was invited to participate in a seminar in Washington... it must have been '81, '82, somewhere in there. Anyway, it was presided over by Air Force brass, mainly a general named Leland."
"Leland," Julie said, looking at Bolan. He put a finger to his lips in response.
"Anyway," Robbie continued, "it was one of those meetings of the minds sort of thing where hypothetical situations are tossed around. The theme of this particular retreat was, how to negotiate a coup d'état with as little financing and backing as possible."
This time it was Bolan who looked at Julie. A million apologies seeped from her eyes.
"Well," Robbie went on, "I presented my hypothetical scenario. I believe the name of it was 'Fire in the Sky.' It was quite well received, and all based on extrapolation from current scientific thought. It worked like this: the only way a major coup could be accomplished would be if the governmental structure had broken down completely, leaving the coup organizers in leadership positions, with the President of the United States in pocket to ensure a smooth transition of power. We were just getting into the shuttle program then, which gave me the idea for the means to accomplish the breakdown of government."
The man stopped and drank again, Bolan amazed at the information that was coming so casually from his lips.
"Where was I?" he asked.
"The shuttle program," Julie prompted.
"Ah, yes. I knew that the Pentagon had funds to work with, so setting up the systems could logically be done with the government's own money, with nothing having to come from the overthrow group, except for a top Pentagon officer who had access to the unreported funding. That was the key. All that had to be done, was to set up a dummy project and put it into the computers, giving all coconspirators an existing communications system. Now, listen to this, this is really beautiful. At that point, I showed how the next major scientific advance would be in liquid electricity, the need for which is the only thing holding up the development of major laser weapons. So, you fund research in a big way, using, of course, government money.”
"Of course," Bolan repeated, stunned by what he was hearing.
"Then, you get the laser weapons and send them up in the space shuttle, disguised as weather satellites or something equally innocuous. On the given day, you simply turn these weapons on, controlling them from a secret base in the Everglades."
"Why the Everglades?" Julie asked.
"You've obviously never been to the Everglades. You could hide a whole country down there. Anyway, you turn on the weapons. Maybe one goes to work on Moscow, just burning it to the ground, the others zeroing in on concentrations of missile silos."
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"Then the Soviets have no choice but to hit back as their missiles explode in the silos," Bolan concluded.
"And the U.S. is the logical place to strike," Julie said.
"Beautiful, no?" Robbie sounded smug. "Action and reaction take place quickly, with our conspirators taking the President underground to wait it out while other key military leaders not in on the plans are assassinated by underlings."
"But doesn't the whole world get destroyed in your scenario?" Julie asked.
"Not really," Robbie replied. "You see, the lasers will still be up there working, using up trillions of volts of juice, just zapping Russian missiles on their own territory and burning down their cities. Oh sure, a lot of missiles will get through, but the point is, they'll be totally destroyed, while we will have taken away enough of their threat that large segments of our society will survive. We'll lose maybe a hundred million, a hundred and fifty million tops."
"This is insane!" Julie shouted.
"Take it easy," Robbie said, frowning. "For heaven's sake, it's just a scenario...just a story. Do you want to hear it, or not?"
"Go on," Julie said, agitated. "I want to hear it."
"You take your key people," Robbie said, excited by his own story, "and you don't need a lot. You put them underground, preferably in a deeply buried military compound from which you also control communications and your laser satellites. You make sure they're single, not attached to anything or anyone except your plan."
"What about all the people who've been running around doing all the dirty work for you?" Bolan asked.
The man shrugged. "Hired help. Screw them. When the dust settles, you have the President speak to what's left of the nation and tell them the Russians started a war and lost. You have the President put your man in charge of the cleanup, then you make sure the President never has any power again. Everything stays intact, nobody even knows what's happened. Martial law is in effect because of the war, and you make sure it stays in effect. All this because of the invention of liquid electricity, which has a world-shattering potential in the area of weaponry. Controlling it means that you could take over the country with no more than fifteen or twenty people who actually even know what the scenario is. Everybody else is just military and simply follow orders. And there you have a cheap, low-manpower plan for taking over the government of the United States of America. What do you think?"
"I think the world is going to end tomorrow morning," Bolan stated flatly.
"Oh, Mack," Julie said. "What are we going to do?"
"What's the problem?" Robbie seemed perplexed. "What are you guys so upset about?"
Bolan looked at the man. The mastermind of the destruction of the entire planet seemed so innocent, so guileless.
"Didn't it strike you as odd," the warrior asked, "that the shuttle blew up on the same day that Jerry Butler was killed?"
"Should it have?" Hampton replied. "History is full of strange juxtapositions. It was a coincidence."
"How about the attack on the institute?" Julie prodded. "Didn't it seem odd to you that the destruction happened on the same day that you reported Mack to your people?"
"I report to my people at least once a week."
Bolan stood. "This is getting us nowhere. Listen, Robbie, Project GOG is set to go tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. Do you understand that? Tomorrow morning, you, me, Florida and the rest of the world are going to be blown to bits, so General Leland can assume command."
"You're kidding." The man's face still did not register that he comprehended anything that was being said.
"And I'll tell you something else," Bolan continued. "You can play Mr. Innocent all day long, but there's only one way I figure that Jerry Butler could have found out about GOG — you fed him information the same way you fed it to me. Didn't you?" He moved to the man and stuck the barrel of the gun in his face. "Didn't you?"
Robbie shut his eyes. "Life gets so boring sometimes," he whispered.
"So you like to spice it up."
"Yes," the man said in agreement, easing back in the chair, Bolan relentlessly moving closer with the AutoMag.
"Well, at the very least, you are directly responsible for the deaths of Jerry Butler, Ike Silver and Peg Ackerman, who was wiped out because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"I don't accept that." Robbie eased the gun barrel away from his face so he could take off his glasses to clean them.
"That's your deal, isn't it?" Bolan asked. "No responsibility for you. You owe nothing to your world or your fellow man or your country and its laws."
"Laws are all invented realities," Robbie told them, putting his glasses back on. "Everything's plastic, all is change. I take no responsibility for the actions or thoughts of others."
Bolan stared at him. "Are you ready to die, then, Robbie? Are you willing to abdicate responsibility for my actions in taking your life?"
"I've done nothing!" Hampton said, fear, finally, in his eyes. "I just tell stories!"
Bolan held up the gun. "And all I do is pull this little metal flange. I take no responsibility for the bullets that shoot out of the gun."
He put his hand around Robbie's throat. The man's eyes went wide. "Please don't kill me!" he begged. "Oh, God, please don't kill me!"
"I'm not going to kill you, Robbie," Bolan said. "I'm just going to see to it that you do for us what you did for Leland."
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bolan stood with the phone to his ear, watching Robbie Hampton, freed from the confines of reality, taking the situation in hand. He hurried around busily, happy as a lark, tacking a geological map of Florida on the wall that Julie held up for him.
"He says he can locate the base for us, Hal," Bolan said. "What I'm going to need from you is coordination and help."
"We're tied in to General Ferris of the Joint Chiefs," Brognola answered. "He says he can give us military backup if we can just locate the damned place."
Bolan looked at his watch. "Can we do it in time?"
"If anybody can do it, Ferris can. He's as married to this as we are.''
"You got a good computer man?" Bolan asked.
"Yeah. Bob Ito's the best. And he's through up here, Mack. Project GOG was cut off the net a few hours ago."
"Get him on a jet. According to Robbie, everything of any value to the project is locked up in that Everglades compound. If we take it, I want someone here who'll know how to shut things down. Robbie says they've probably gone to automatic countdown on the satellite system, which means we'll have to go in cold and work our way into the system to shut it down."
"Got a problem with that, pard," Hal replied, his voice sounding incredibly tired. "We haven't been able to come up with the password yet, and we're too afraid of a tapeworm on the system to experiment around too much."
"We'll just have to work on that," Bolan said. "Let's get to the damned thing first."
"Okay... we're open. What have you got?"
"Hold on." Bolan laid the receiver down, as Robbie Hampton's living room rapidly changed around him into a junk pile of books, maps and professional journals. "Talk to me, Robbie!"
"Okay, look," Hampton said, excited, the way Bolan had seen him at the institute when he was heavily involved in a problem. "When I concocted my theory about the Everglades base, I went in with a real problem. Florida is mostly unstable swampland, absolutely no good for any kind of mining or underground work. So, I researched the geology of the area and found this."
He pointed to the map he had tacked on the wall. "There's a solid deep base core of sedimentary rock, called Osceola's Strata, after the Seminole chief who went to war against the United States government. It runs from the lower basin of Big Lostman's Bay on the southwest coast to the Mangrove Swamp on the southern tip."
He took a pen from behind his ear and circled an area solidly in the center of Mangrove Swamp. "Right here is the best bet," he said, pointing with the pen. "Far from any population centers, thick strata..."
"How
could something like this be built without the government's knowing about it?" Bolan asked.
"That brings me to my next point. Go back through the computer records. Check with the Army Corps of Engineers, and with the GSA over bidding. See if the government has contracted for any work in the Everglades during the past six years. If they are truly working from the theory I invented, then they would very strictly use government funding for this project as a matter of policy. It's a fascinating thought. They could overthrow the government totally on taxpayer money."
Bolan ran and picked up the phone. "Hal..."
"We heard," Brognola said. "Bob's already working on it. Mack, we're putting a lot of eggs in this guy's basket. Are you sure we can depend on him?"
"If we can't, Hal, he dies with the rest of us tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow morning," Brognola repeated. "Kind of gives you the creeps, doesn't it?"
"We've still got thirteen hours," Bolan said. "I'll stop for the creeps after this is over."
"Okay. We've got something on this end, and it looks good. The Army Corps of Engineers helped drain a swamp forty miles south of Florida City in the eastern Everglades, and bidding was accepted from a Dade Construction Company for the building of a research complex at that location, the financing charged against Project GOG."
Bolan looked up at Robbie. "Florida City?"
The man drew in his brows and looked at the map. "It's outside the Osceola Strata," he said. "It can't be there."
"My man doesn't like it."
"But he's making it up," Brognola replied, "taking it on the fly. This is solid — budgeted, for God's sake."
"Let's keep both options open," Bolan suggested, "and get the ball rolling. We'll make a decision when we have to."
"Fair enough. And Mack, ask your boy what, exactly, happened to the shuttle."
"He wants to know what happened to the shuttle," Bolan called to Robbie.
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