by Brad Thor
“Why would they just leave it out in the middle of the jungle?”
Naylor shrugged. “I know. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“There were dead bodies near it as well?”
“Bodies, vehicles. There’s a ton of weird stuff.”
“Do you think it caused the death of the people you found?” she asked.
“You mean is it some sort of chem/bio weapon? I don’t think so. What happened to these people is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“So what’s this all about?”
Naylor adjusted the air conditioning and looked into the rearview mirror at Tracy. “I assume that’s what you’re here to help figure out.”
CHAPTER 37
They drove as far into the jungle as they could and then stopped. Naylor had wanted to hire some Guaranis to act as porters but Walsh had been against it. He wanted their visit kept quiet—the fewer people who knew, the better. This, of course, meant that they were going to have to carry all of their own gear.
They removed everything from the vehicles and loaded it into their packs. Weapons were then distributed to everyone with military training, which meant everyone but Leslie Paxton. Jack told her he’d give her a weapon if she wanted one, but Leslie politely declined. “I’m not a soldier,” she said. “I’m a scientist.”
After camouflaging the vehicles, they struck off into the jungle on foot. It had rained earlier and the ground was muddy. It made for slow going.
The SF men took turns scouting forward and circling back to make sure they weren’t being followed. They were intense professionals who took their job very seriously. As far as they were concerned, this was hostile territory and they expected to be attacked. It was easy to hope for the best as long as you were prepared for the worst.
Two hours later, they came to the beginning of the old, abandoned road. Naylor showed them the pavers and explained that they were getting close.
They followed the winding path down into the wide gully. Leslie had her Flipcam out and was taking high-definition video of everything.
When they reached the enormous stones, the team stopped so that she could investigate them.
After shrugging off his pack, Naylor walked over and joined her. “Pretty impressive, aren’t they?”
“Incredible,” she responded.
“Look at these,” he said, leading her over to the strange symbols he had seen carved into the stones on his first visit. “What do you make of them?”
“They’re runes.”
“As in Viking letters?”
“Kind of,” said Paxton as she zoomed her camera in for a close-up. “What you see here are symbols used in Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet. The Scandinavians used something different called futhark. This isn’t futhark. This is definitely Germanic.”
“How’d they get here?”
“I don’t know for sure,” she said.
It was obvious she had some sort of an idea, but if she wasn’t going to offer up her hypothesis, Naylor was enough of a professional not to press her for it.
“Do you want to see the rest?” he asked her.
“Absolutely,” said Paxton as she finished filming and followed him over to where they had set down their packs.
They took a few minutes to hydrate and rest before moving on. When they were ready, they reshouldered their gear and headed down into the valley.
Naylor had nicknamed it the “valley of death.” It was dark, cold, and there wasn’t a single living thing in it. Not only could you not see much sunlight filtering through the thick canopy of trees high above, but just like last time, there wasn’t a single bird, monkey, or any other kind of animal making any sound. It was abnormal. Jungles were usually teeming with life. Here, there was just dead silence, dead bodies, and something that looked very much like a bomb.
The valley floor spread out before them. It was choked and overgrown with vegetation. Up ahead, he could see the hulks of the overturned vehicles. “Two o’clock,” he said to the rest of the team. “That’s the first truck from my report.”
“Where’s the canister?” asked Tracy.
“About 250 yards farther.”
Tracy looked at Jack Walsh. “I want to see it before we look at anything else.”
The Pentagon man nodded and Naylor led the way. Fifty yards in, he stopped and pointed. “It’s over there,” he said. As Tracy started to walk toward it, he put a hand on her arm, “So are the bodies.”
“I’m a big girl,” she replied. “I can handle it.”
Naylor doubted it. Even he had been repulsed by what he had seen, and he was a doctor. He let her go.
The SF men fanned out to form a perimeter as Tracy closed the distance with the canister.
The call from Jack Walsh had come out of the blue. Tracy hadn’t spoken with him in almost a year. When he told her what he needed, she thought he was pulling her leg. He wanted her to travel to South America with him to check out a possible bomb. Only Jack Walsh could call someone out of the blue and make that kind of request.
He said it was hard to get to; that they would have to hike in and carry all of their equipment on their backs. It was then that Tracy knew why he had asked her. Jack Walsh’s assignment sounded very much like a suicide operation. And Tracy Hastings was the perfect candidate.
Yes, she had no doubt that Walsh respected her for her abilities. She was a fantastic EOD tech, but he’d be hard-pressed to find someone on such short notice willing to go in with everything but a protective bomb suit. At sixty to seventy pounds, no one was going to be able to carry all the tools they needed and a bomb suit. It just wasn’t going to happen. The other factor, the fact that this assignment could very well end up killing her, was something she found almost appealing. It wasn’t necessarily the danger she was drawn to, but rather the potential that this could end everything.
After her accident and medical discharge from the Navy, Tracy had spent a lot of time getting her life back together and learning to live with her disfigurement. Then she had met someone. He was handsome, exciting, kind, and very funny. He was also former Navy, just like her. His name was Scot Harvath, and they had been perfect for each other.
He had just moved into a new house, a former Anglican church near Mount Vernon, overlooking the Potomac. They hadn’t been dating long, and on a whim, he had called her in New York to come down to see it. She booked a seat on the last shuttle of the night and picked up Italian on the way back from the airport.
They ate picnic-style in front of the rectory’s old fireplace. The next morning, she let him sleep in. With a cup of coffee in her hand, she had stepped outside to pick some of the flowers growing wild near the front door. It was a warm summer morning. Someone had left a package. She bent down and that was the last thing she remembered before being shot.
The gunman was carrying out a vendetta; preying on the people closest to Scot. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but at least she had survived. That was the bright side friends insisted on emphasizing with her. They had no idea how piercing the headaches that she suffered almost daily were. The only relief was when she was heavily medicated. It was no way to go through life. No way at all.
It had taken a while, but she had finally managed to convince Scot that he was better off without her. He wanted a family; children. Those things were just not in the picture for her. In fact, she really couldn’t see anything in her picture, which was precisely why she had said yes to Walsh.
Approaching the bomb, she removed her backpack and propped it up against a large rock. She could see the torn and misshapen bodies in the near distance and couldn’t tear her eyes away. What the hell had happened here? Her mind couldn’t make sense of it. Even Jack Walsh’s attempts to prepare her hadn’t come close to getting her ready for what she was looking at.
She realized she was standing there with her mouth agape, studying the horror in front of her. Finally, her eyes fell back down to the canister. That was
why she was here. She needed to focus on that, not the bodies. She was here for what might be a bomb, and what might be her destiny.
CHAPTER 38
As Tracy removed the equipment from her pack, she glanced at the bodies. She wondered if the bomb had something to do with what had happened to them. She felt her heart pick up speed as her mind asked if she was in store for the same fate.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Focus.
Tracy studied the object in front of her as she assembled a portable Terahertz Radiation, or T-ray, scanner. The object sure looked like a bomb, but not some jihadist’s improvised explosive device. It looked military. Naylor had been smart not to touch it.
It was roughly the size and shape of a fire hydrant and was lying on its side. Made out of some sort of metal, it had been painted olive drab. Numbers or letters once stenciled upon it had been all but sanded away. Just seeing pictures of it, Tracy had sensed what Jack Walsh’s fear was and she had agreed with him. The device looked like the kind that could contain a small tactical nuke. But by the same token, so could a wheely bag at the airport. It wasn’t the housing that ultimately mattered, it was what was inside.
Firing up the T-ray scanner, she marveled at what a great piece of equipment it was. It allowed EOD techs something called “stand off” capability, meaning you could study a potential bomb from several meters away, often gathering helpful information before having to really get up close and personal. That information could save your life.
According to the scanner’s display screen, there was no radiation. That didn’t mean the device didn’t contain a nuke of some sort, it simply meant that at this distance, it didn’t appear to be leaking.
Tracy approached the device and did a slow 360 around it. At about 160 degrees in, the scanner alerted her to the presence of a substance known as PBX-9501. Not good.
PBX, or polymer-bonded explosive, was a highly explosive material used in several nuclear warhead configurations.
After finishing her turn around the device, she set the scanner down and ran her list of render-safe procedures through her mind.
She began her work by studying the device for any antihandling devices—a fancy term for boobytrap. While she wasn’t afraid to die, she wasn’t going to walk knowingly into a trap.
As she got down to business, she noticed how much cooler it was here than in the rest of the jungle. That was a good thing, as she tended to sweat pretty hard dismantling a weapon. The fact that this appeared to be a lot more than just your average explosive device was definitely upping the perspiration factor.
There were no wires protruding from the housing and as far as she could tell, there was nothing that had been placed beneath it. In fact, it looked like it had simply just landed there.
Taking a deep breath, she began the disassembly. It was a slow, very deliberate, very precise process. More than once, Tracy stopped, backed up, and second-guessed what she was doing, convinced she had forgotten something. Once bombed, twice shy, she joked to herself.
After twenty minutes, she was able to get the cover off, and she laid it carefully on the ground. Picking her scanner back up, she turned it on and swept the open mouth of the device. It hit for PBX, but not for radiation.
Tracy looked inside. Instead of a code-decoder unit attached to a firing unit and then a warhead, as she had expected, she discovered a long aluminum tube wrapped in copper wire. Attached to the end of it was some sort of transformer. There were several other exotic components she didn’t recognize.
She carefully removed the items and laid them out on a plastic drop cloth. Once she had finished, she told Walsh and the others that it was safe to come over. She also told herself that she could now really look at the bodies. The team joined her.
Though the sight was incredibly grotesque, Paxton studied each body with the cold detachment of a clinician, a scientist. Once her first examination was complete, she captured each corpse on video.
“What happened here?” Tracy asked.
“We don’t know,” Leslie replied.
She stared at the mangled corpses and body parts sticking out of the sheer rock. “Does this have something to do with what I just disassembled?”
“We’re just as much in the dark on this as you are.”
Tracy didn’t know whether to believe that or not. “Really?” she said. “I saw the way you looked at those bodies. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear you’d seen all this before.”
Tracy was nice enough, and Jack seemed to like her a lot, but she wasn’t authorized to be read in on what was going on here. Pointing at Naylor, Paxton said, “It was all in his report. He included photographs.”
There was something about the way she defended herself that Tracy found less than convincing. Before she could respond, though, Walsh motioned for her to come join him at the bomb.
“So what do we have?” he asked as she walked over and stood be-side him.
Tracy looked down at the various parts. “At first, I thought we were looking at something along the lines of a tactical nuke, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“If it was a nuke, where’s the warhead?”
Tracy shrugged. “That’s just it. There is none. In fact, I couldn’t find any explosives in it at all, just trace amounts picked up by the scanner.”
“Any indication of country of origin or who this might have belonged to?”
“I couldn’t find any discernible markings.”
“May I?” asked Leslie Paxton, who had tucked away her camera and was now looking at the bomb components.
“Be my guest,” said Tracy.
“So you thought this might be some kind of tactical nuke, just like I did,” stated Naylor.
“Yes,” she replied, putting her fingers up in the air to make quotation marks, “but there’s no ‘nuke’ to this device. It’s something else.”
“It certainly is,” said Leslie as she picked up the long aluminum tube wrapped in copper wire. “This piece here is called a flux compression generator.”
“What is it?”
“It creates something that has the potential to be more horrifying than the Black Death, more costly in lives than any war we’ve ever fought, and so financially devastating it could make Hurricane Katrina look like a handful of change lost under a couch cushion.”
With the rest of the team staring at her, she clarified her remarks. “You’re looking at a crude electromagnetic pulse weapon.”
CHAPTER 39
Basically,” said Paxton, “electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, is an electromagnetic shockwave.”
“It completely fries things that are electronic, right?” asked Naylor.
“That’s right,” replied Leslie. “We got our first real taste of what an EMP could do after we ignited several hydrogen bombs over the Pacific in 1958.
“The resultant hurricane of electrons traveled hundreds of miles and blew out street lamps in Hawaii, while disrupting radio transmissions in Australia for over eighteen hours. We decided then and there that if we could harness this destructive force, it would make one heck of a weapon.”
“And I’m assuming we did,” said Tracy.
Jack Walsh nodded. “Much of it’s classified, but suffice it to say that we have a lot of EMP weapons in development and in our arsenal.”
“As do our enemies,” added Paxton. “Electromagnetic warfare has been one of the military’s greatest concerns. Successfully employed, an EMP weapon could send us back to the Dark Ages. We wouldn’t be able to heat or cool homes, pump water, remove sewage, dispatch police or firefighters, process or deliver food and medicine. It would be absolute chaos. Millions upon millions of people would die.”
Naylor looked at the device they were standing over. “From one small bomb like this?” he asked.
Walsh shook his head. “This kind of device is not going to take down the entire United States power grid. For a one-shot, one-kill like that, you’d need to actually
detonate a nuke high above the center of the country.
“What’s dangerous about an e-bomb like this is that they are very inexpensive to fabricate. Any nation or terrorist group with 1940s level scientific technology could build one.
“For less than the cost of a new car, you could build twenty of these devices and plunge the island of Manhattan into darkness for months. With our dependence upon electricity for just about everything in our lives, New York City would become a dead zone, virtually uninhabitable. On top of that, anything stored on computer would be evaporated—banking records, stock transactions, medical records. Also, anything with electronic circuitry would be, as you said, fried. The economic impact would be incalculable. Add to that the loss of human life that would occur and you would have a terrorist attack that would easily dwarf 9/11.
“Give a terrorist organization one hundred thousand dollars and they could do this in ten cities; with a million dollars they could do it in one hundred, and so on. There’d be nothing we could do to stop it.”
“So how did this bomb get here?” asked Tracy.
Paxton held up the aluminum tube and pointed inside it. “This tube is normally filled with a high explosive like PBX. That’s the boom part of the bomb. The fact that this device was rendered inert suggests that it is probably being used in a training exercise of some sort.”
Naylor nodded. “We’ve got plenty of terrorist organizations to choose from down here. We can start with just about any of them.”
“Hold it,” said Tracy. “What does an EMP device have to do with what happened to these bodies? Is there another aspect of EMP detonations that we don’t know about?”
“Apparently, there’s a lot going on that we don’t know about,” replied Leslie. “Are we concerned that some sort of weapon did this to these people? Yes. That’s part of the reason we’re here. What I think we should do now is scour the site and see what other evidence we can gather.”
With the SF men maintaining a perimeter, Paxton suggested they split into teams. She sent Ryan and Tracy in one direction and then led Jack in the other.