“They’re in here?” Curtis asked, bewildered.
“More precisely,” Ridley told him, “they’re beneath it. That’s the site of an old Cold War ICBM base. They must have made it at least partly habitable, and used the truck repair company as a front.”
“Maybe the trucking guys didn’t even know,” Komick murmured. He glanced up to find everyone looking at him. “Stranger things have happened, you know.”
“Actually,” Ridley said, “you’re probably right. The truck business is completely legitimate. That’s part of the reason it took so long to track them down. But once we had several leads pointing us at the trucking business, we interviewed everyone we could who’d had anything to do with it. We also had the lucky break from the Russians about the plane, without which we would never have gotten this far.” She shook her head in grudging admiration. “They didn’t make it easy to find them.”
“Did you find the plane?” the Director of National Intelligence asked.
“No. It had taken off earlier on what we know now was a bogus flight plan. We’re not sure where it is, but we’ll find it.”
“To hell with the plane,” Curtis spat, holding the satellite image in shaking hands. “What are we going to do about this?”
“We’ve already got an assault team ready to go in,” Ridley told him. “All they need is your go-ahead.”
“A team?” Curtis said angrily. “A team? I want bloody overwhelming, irresistible force!”
“A hundred and fifty heavily armed FBI agents is ‘bloody overwhelming, irresistible force,’ Mr. President,” she replied evenly. “And remember, sir, that those men and women are very...motivated, shall we say. After the bombing of the FBI lab, not to mention the betrayals by Dawson and Richards, they want payback.”
“Payback?” Komick asked quietly. “What about justice?”
“Is there a difference, Jeff?” Curtis asked caustically. “What justice did the hundreds killed in Colorado have? Or the workers in the New Horizons plant? Or any of the other people who’ve been blown up lately? Not to mention all the people who may die of disease in the time it takes New Horizons to rebuild that plant and get production of those seeds going again.” He glared at Komick. “They poured everything they had into that plant and had everyone who’d been involved in the project there to make sure there weren’t any screwups.” He shook his head in disgust. “It was a disaster for which there can never be any justice.”
Turning back to Ridley, he said simply, “Go.”
***
“My God!” Richards cried over the intercom as the Hughes MD520N helicopter dodged through the ravines along the northeast edge of Sutter Buttes, the landing skids occasionally thwacking against a tree branch. He had always hated helicopters, and he hated flying low even more. And Ferris was flying really, really low. “You’re going to get us killed!”
“Shut up,” Ferris snapped as he pulled the nimble helicopter up and to the left, rolling into the next ravine. He had seen over a dozen helicopters approaching the Buttes behind them, no doubt from Beale Air Force Base to the east. They had the unmistakable sleek profile of military UH-60 Blackhawks, and Ferris had a good idea where they were going. The Blackhawks had a speed advantage, but if they were laden with troops, which he knew they must be, they wouldn’t catch him with the head start he had on them.
After dropping off Hathcock’s strike team in Nebraska, Ferris had landed the Falcon at Sutter County Airport in Yuba City, about fifteen miles southeast of the EDS base. He had landed there after Naomi had called to warn him that the FBI had issued an alert to local law enforcement agencies about the Falcon, and that Oroville airport was probably swarming with police and FBI agents. Renee had a helicopter chartered and waiting for him, and Richards was there, too. Ferris almost cried when he looked at the Falcon one last time as he took off in the helicopter: he had come to love that plane, but knew he would never fly it again.
And Richards...if Naomi hadn’t ordered him to pick up the obnoxious FBI man and Jack hadn’t vouched for him having saved all their asses when they’d returned from Spitsbergen, Ferris would have kicked him out of the chopper. He’d done nothing but moan and complain about Ferris’s flying, but Ferris was too much of a professional to fly even lower and faster just to piss off Richards even more.
Well, mostly, Ferris thought to himself as he yanked the helicopter almost vertical out of the last ravine before making a beeline for the old Titan base.
“Renee,” he called over their secure radio, “we’re coming in! But be advised: we’ve got some unwelcome guests hot on our asses. I’m guessing a hundred plus troops, maybe five minutes behind us.”
“Roger,” Renee replied instantly. “We’ll be ready.”
With another glance over his shoulder to check the position of the approaching Blackhawks, Ferris angled the Hughes in for a hard landing just outside the base’s fence line, as the inner compound was too crowded with trucks and trailers to land.
“Come on!” he shouted to Richards as he quickly undid his safety harness and hopped out. He sprinted for the repair building, not even bothering to shut down the chopper.
***
“Is everyone topside away?” Naomi asked.
The man in the video screen nodded, just as he was joined by a panting Ferris and a clearly disoriented Richards. “I sent all the uncleared workers home,” the man said. “The rest of us are ready to come below.”
“Stand by,” Naomi said. “The portal is opening now.”
Behind the small group of men and women who stood around the man in the video, the cadre who worked in the truck repair shop and who knew its true nature, the door to the secret room where the portal entrance lay slid open. They all went through it, and as it closed behind them, the massive blast doors of the portal elevator shaft opened.
Naomi watched on the security console as everyone piled into the big elevator, then she hit the control to bring down the elevator and close the portal’s blast doors above them.
A few minutes later, Ferris and Richards entered the conference room.
“You’re all crazy,” Richards blurted.
“You tried a little face off with the Director of the FBI in some kind of macho stunt, and you have the balls to call us crazy?” Naomi shot back.
“That’s not what I mean,” Richards told her. “This place is a death trap!” He looked at Jack. “There’s no other way out of here, is there?”
Jack shook his head.
“If you thought that,” Naomi snapped, coming over to face him, “why did you bother to come here?”
“Excuse me, kids,” Renee cut in sarcastically, noting that Jack hadn’t dived into the verbal slugfest, but had his attention riveted to the wall displays showing maps and video images of the surface level compound, “but I think we’ve got bigger problems than your hormone levels.”
“Here they come,” Jack said grimly as dozens of troops in black uniforms slid to the ground from ropes tossed out the doors of the Blackhawks that now hovered above the maze of trucks and trailers. They landed in a ring around the outer part of the truck parking area, then began to move inward toward the repair building.
“Oh, no,” Richards muttered as he got a better look at some of them when they passed by one of the hidden cameras. They had “FBI” stenciled in large letters on the back of their uniforms, with smaller stencils on the front. He and Jack exchanged a sick look.
“Don’t worry,” Naomi reassured them. “They’re not going to have an easy time getting to us.”
“They’ll never reach the portal,” Renee said, but her voice held nothing but dismay and regret.
“I’m not worried about them reaching us,” Jack told them. “It’s just...”
“The idea of killing fellow agents isn’t exactly appealing,” Richards finished for him quietly.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi told them, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder. Looking at the map of the compound and the red dots that represented the approa
ching agents, she picked up a headset and handed it to Richards. “You can try to warn them off.”
From the tone of her voice, Richards knew that she didn’t expect him to have much luck. He shook his head, but reached for the headset anyway. He slipped it over his head, putting the microphone close to his lips. Naomi hit a control and gave him a thumbs up. “Agents of the FBI,” he said firmly. The men and women moving through the compound paused as the public address system in the repair shop boomed out over the compound. “This is Special Agent Carl Richards. This facility is heavily defended and you will not succeed in breaching it. I know...I know what you’re feeling. I know you have a job to do. But if you come any closer, many of you may die. And it will be for absolutely nothing. Just...just quarantine this facility. Cordon off the perimeter...”
He stopped talking as the agents, most of them visibly shaking their heads, and a few of them making obscene gestures, continued to move forward.
Gently, Naomi took the headset back. “I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Now what?” Jack asked in a raspy voice. All the spit in his mouth had dried up and he was clenching his fists as the agents, no doubt some of whom he’d worked with before, moved closer to the repair building.
“It’s not going to be pretty, Jack,” Renee said shakily. “Tan was in charge of setting up the physical security for this and the other sites we have.” She glanced up at him. “He was a ruthless bastard.”
“Just get on with it,” Naomi ordered. “None of us want to do this, but we can’t allow them to get in. We’ve got to stay on-line until all the trucks are accounted for. We’re also the last major genebank in case any of the New Horizons seed does get out.” Folding her arms as if she were suddenly chilled, she said, “Do it.”
Renee nodded, then started clicking controls in another window on her workstation. On the map display at the front of the room, a cloud of green icons bloomed across the compound. Jack could see that many of them were out in the open and assumed they were mines, but there were others that were clearly in or on some of the trailers parked on the surface.
The result was instantaneous and overwhelming. The video feeds of the compound were suddenly shaken by dozens of near-simultaneous explosions as bounding anti-personnel mines, often called “Bouncing Bettys,” were triggered. Much worse were the booby-trapped trailers: they were fitted with long strips of explosive with embedded ball bearings that, when detonated, were like enormous Claymore mines. In an instant, tens of thousands of small ball bearings scythed through the ranks of the FBI agents.
“Christ,” Richards moaned as he watched the cream of the Bureau massacred in a hail of metal. He had no idea how many died in that first wave, but he was filled with a painful mix of fierce pride and emotional agony as those who survived refused to break and run, but continued to move forward.
Proud and determined or not, they couldn’t stand against the base’s defenses. In twos and threes, and sometimes larger groups, they were mowed down by the thick barrier of mines through which they had to move to get to their objective.
Jack was numb as he watched the carnage, noting absently that Naomi, Renee, and several others, including some men, in the command center were crying. He knew that defending the base was necessary and that people would die in the process. But he also knew that there would be a special place reserved for him in Hell for his part in this.
At last, the remaining agents finally gave up valor for discretion and began to pull back.
“Turn off the mines behind them,” Jack said hoarsely. “Let them get out.”
“It’s already done,” Renee managed as she tried to dry her tears on her sleeve.
They watched in silence as the special agents retreated, the survivors heading out through the front gate. So few, Jack thought. He counted less than thirty men and women still on their feet, and half of them appeared to be wounded. He was only thankful that Renee hadn’t turned on any of the audio pickups that he was sure were up on the surface. He didn’t know what he would have done if he’d had to hear the screams of the wounded and dying.
“We’re not out of it yet,” the young man on one of the other consoles called out about five minutes later. He was watching the display from the small air search radar that was installed on top of the repair building, its housing disguised as a battered exhaust fan cowling. “Looks like we have a pair of fast movers inbound...” He managed to pick them up by slaving a video camera to the radar track. The command center staff was rewarded with a jittery view of what Jack identified as a pair of F-15E Strike Eagles. “They’re going straight for the repair building.”
“Don’t tell me you have SAMs?” Richards asked. He was still pale and shaken.
Naomi shook her head. “No,” she said, “we don’t have anything that sophisticated. We’d hoped to never have to do what we’re doing now: our best defense was secrecy.”
A hail of black objects separated from the Eagles as they streaked overhead.
Down below the surface in the command dome, Jack and the others felt and heard nothing, but the video feeds and other information from the surface suddenly disappeared from the displays. The repair shop, the mines, and probably most of the trailers that still had any explosive strips had just been wiped away.
“Damn,” Naomi whispered. Turning to Jack, she said, “Do they have any bombs that can reach us down here?”
“A BLU-109, maybe,” Ferris piped up before Jack could say anything. “It’s a two-thousand pound bunker buster bomb that might be able to penetrate the blast doors on the silos and the portal, but I don’t think they have anything that can reach us down here.”
“But if they can breach the surface blast doors,” Naomi said worriedly, “they could destroy the silos. If they do...”
Ferris shook his head and shrugged. “I can only tell you what I know, girl,” he said quietly.
“Do we have any eyes left topside?” Jack asked.
“We’ve got the periscopic sensor array and camera,” Renee confirmed. Clicking some controls on her workstation, she said, “There...”
The video camera on the sensor mast rose from its submerged storage sleeve and showed them a scene of utter devastation: the repair shop was gone, blown into wreckage that was strewn across the compound. And there, moving quickly through the still-smoking remains of the building and vehicles, were the surviving FBI agents.
“Persistent buggers,” Renee said, her voice a mixture of admiration and fear.
“The good news is that we probably won’t get bombed while they’re here,” Jack said. “The bad news is that it looks like they’re heading straight for the air intake opening.” The vent, hidden under a thick grate in the back corner of the repair shop, had been covered with an armored manifold. But the manifold had been blown open: one of the Eagle pilots had gotten lucky with a bomb.
Naomi shook her head. “Even if they can get through the surface vent, they won’t be able to get inside,” she said. “The blast valves are closed, and they couldn’t get through them without heavy explosives.”
“See those satchels a couple of those guys are carrying,” Richards said, pointing to a pair of agents who were clearly being protected by the others. “There’s your heavy explosives.”
“I’m not so worried about them getting in,” Jack said darkly. “I’m more worried about what might get out.” He looked at the others. “Remember what we have trapped in the intake chamber.”
“What?” Richards said, looking from Jack to Naomi and back.
“God,” Naomi said, the blood draining from her face. “We can’t let them get near it!”
“Near what, dammit?” Richards shouted angrily.
“What we think is now a harvester, or becoming one,” Naomi explained. “It killed one of my people and our test animals. We think it went into the air intake tunnel, and we barricaded it in by welding steel plate over the tunnel mouth. As long as the blast valves are intact, it can’t get out...”
“But
if those guys manage to blow them open,” Richards finished for her, understanding now, “if the blast doesn’t kill the thing it could take the place of one of them, just like it did Ray Clement.”
“We’ve got to stop them,” Jack said. “We’ve got to go topside and fight them off.”
“Jack, no!” Naomi exclaimed. “I won’t allow it!”
Turning to her, Jack said, “The only alternative is to tear down the plating covering up the intake tunnel so we can go in and kill...whatever is in there.” He nodded his head toward the ceiling. “I’d rather take my chances fighting a kind of opponent I understand.”
“Let’s just get this done,” Richards growled. “Anybody have a weapon and some body armor?”
***
“My God,” President Curtis said into the silence of the White House Situation Room. “This is a disaster.”
The Predator drone orbiting over the EDS base had shown the massacre of the FBI assault team in high definition video detail on the room’s main display screen. No one in the room, with the exception of the senior military officers who were all veterans of both Gulf Wars, had ever seen such carnage.
The FBI SAC for the raid had been in an orbiting Blackhawk, and had been given the authority to call in an air strike as a last resort. No one had expected the “last resort” to be necessary in the first few minutes of the operation. And the air strike hadn’t even touched the Titan base itself.
Seeing that there might be a way into the base through a hole blown in some sort of vent, the SAC, shaken though he was, ordered a team in to take advantage of the situation.
“If this doesn’t work,” Curtis said, “I want something ready that will.” He turned and looked directly at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Coleridge, United States Marine Corps.
“If this,” Coleridge nodded at the video display showing the agents now clustering around the hole blown in the massive vent, “doesn’t work, we can use the BLU-109 penetrator bomb. It’s a two thousand pound weapon that was designed to deal with hardened underground structures. We think it will penetrate the blast doors on the surface, but–”
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