by Tom Clancy
“I know, Ed. But we can’t let them go, and we probably can’t prosecute them, can we? What’s that leave?” Clark paused. “I’ll try something creative.”
“What?”
John Clark explained his idea. “If they fight back, well, then, it makes things easier for us, doesn’t it?”
“Twenty men against maybe fifty?”
“My twenty—actually, more like fifteen—against those feather merchants? Give me a break, Ed. It may be the moral equivalent of murder, but not the legal equivalent.”
Foley frowned mightily, worried about what would happen if this ever made the media, but there was no particular reason that it should. The special-operations community kept all manner of secrets, many of which would look bad in the public media. “John,” he said finally.
“Yeah, Ed?”
“Make sure you don’t get caught.”
“Never happened yet, Ed,” Rainbow Six reminded him.
“Approved,” said the Director of Central Intelligence, wondering how the hell he’d ever explain this one to the president of the United States.
“Okay, can I use my old office?” Clark had some phone calls to make.
“Sure.”
“Is that all you need?” General Sam Wilson asked.
“Yes, General, that should do it.”
“Can I ask what it’s for?”
“Something covert,” he heard Clark reply.
“That’s all you’re willing to say?”
“Sorry, Sam. You can check this out with Ed Foley if you want.”
“I guess I will,” the general’s voice rumbled.
“Fine with me, sir.” Clark hoped the “sir” part would assuage his hurt feelings.
It didn’t, but Wilson was a pro, and knew the rules. “Okay, let me make some phone calls.”
The first of them went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, whose commanding officer, a colonel, made the expected objection, which was expectedly overridden. That colonel then lifted a phone of his own and ordered an MH-60K Night Hawk special-operations helicopter ferried to Pope Air Force Base, along with a maintenance crew for some TDY to a place he didn’t know about. The next phone call went to an Air Force officer who took his notes and said, “Yes, sir,” like the good airman he was. Getting the pieces in place was mainly an exercise in electronics, lifting encrypted phones and giving spooky orders to people who, fortunately, were accustomed to such things.
Chavez reflected that he’d come three quarters of the way around the world, most of it in the last twenty-two hours, and was landing at an airfield he’d used only once before. There was Air Force One, the VC-25A version of the 747 painted in a scheme known all over the world, and with him was someone who’d planned to kill all the people who’d known it. He’d learned years before not to reflect too much on the things that he did for his country and the $82,450 per year that he now earned as a mid-level CIA employee. He had a master’s degree in international relations, which he jokingly defined as one country fucking another—but now, it wasn’t a country, it was a corporation. Since when did they start to think they could play games at this level? he wondered. Maybe it was the New World Order that President Bush had once talked about. If that’s what it was, it didn’t make sense to the commander of Team-2. Governments were selected, by and large, by the citizens, and answered to them. Corporations answered—if they did so at all—to their shareholders. And that wasn’t quite the same thing. Corporations were supposed to be overseen by the governments of the countries in which they were domiciled, but everything was changing now. It was private corporations that developed and defined the tools that people across the world were using. The changing technological world had given immense power to relatively small organizations, and now he was wondering if that was a good thing or not. Well, if people depended on governments for progress, then they’d still be riding horses and steamships around the world. But in this New World Order things had little in the way of controls at all, and that was something somebody should think about, Chavez decided, as the aircraft came to a halt on the Andrews ramp. Yet another anonymous blue USAF van appeared at the stairs even before they were fully deployed.
“Building up those frequent-flyer miles, Domingo?” John asked from the concrete.
“I suppose. Am I sprouting feathers yet?” Chavez asked tiredly.
“Only one more hop for now.”
“Where to?”
“Bragg.”
“Then let’s do it. I don’t want to get too used to standing still if it’s just temporary.” He needed a shave and a shower, but that, too, would have to wait until Fort Bragg. Soon they were in yet another Air Force short-haul aircraft, lifting off and heading southwest. This hop was blessedly short, and ended at Pope Air Force Base, which adjoins the home of the 82nd Airborne Infantry Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, also home of Delta Force and other special-operations units.
For the first time, someone had thought what to do with Wil Gearing, Noonan saw. Three military policemen carted him off to the base stockade. The rest of the people on the trip ended up in Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, more colloquially known as “the Q.”
Chavez wondered if the clothing he stripped off would ever be clean enough to wear again. But then he showered, and set on the sink in the bathroom was a razor that allowed him to scrape off a full day’s accumulation of black blur on his—he thought—manly face. He emerged to find clothing laid out.
“I had the base people run this over.”
“Thanks, John.” Chavez struggled into the white boxers and T-shirt, then selected the forest-pattern Battle Dress Uniform—BDU—items laid on the bed, complete to socks and boots.
“Long day?”
“Shit, John, it’s been a long month coming back from Australia.” He sat down on the bed, then on reflection lay down on the bedspread. “Now what?”
“Brazil.”
“How come?”
“That’s where they all went. We tracked them down, and I have overheads of the place where they’re camped out.”
“So, we’re going to see them?”
“Yes.”
“To do what, John?”
“To settle this thing out once and for all, Domingo.”
“Suits me, but is it legal?”
“When did you start worrying about that?”
“I’m a married man, John, and a father, remember? I have to be responsible now, man.”
“It’s legal enough, Ding,” his father-in-law told the younger man.
“Okay, you say so. What happens now?”
“You get a nap. The rest of the team arrives in about half an hour.”
“The rest of what team?”
“Everybody who can move and shoot, son.”
“Muy bien, jefe,” Chavez said, closing his eyes.
The British Airways 737-700 was on the ground for as little time as possible, refueled from an Air Force fuel bowser and then lifted off for Dulles International Airport outside Washington, where its presence would not cause much in the way of comment. The Rainbow troopers were bused off to a secure location and allowed to continue their rest. That worried some of them slightly. Being allowed to rest implied that rest was something they’d need soon.
Clark and Alistair Stanley conferred in a room at Joint Special Operations Command Headquarters, a nondescript building facing a small parking lot.
“So, what gives here?” asked Colonel William Byron. Called “Little Willie” by his uniformed colleagues, Colonel Byron had the most unlikely sobriquet in the United States Army. Fully six-four and two hundred thirty pounds of lean, hard meat, Byron was the largest man in JSOC. The name dated back to West Point, where he’d grown six inches and thirty pounds over four years of exercise and wholesome food, and ended up a linebacker on the Army football team that had murdered Navy 35 -10 in the autumn classic at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. His accent was still south Georgia despite his ma
ster’s degree in management from Harvard Business School, which was becoming favored in the American military.
“We’re taking a trip here,” Clark told him, passing the overheads across the table. “We need a helo and not much else.”
“Where the hell is this shithole?”
“Brazil, west of Manaus, on the Río Negro.”
“Some facility,” Byron observed, putting on the reading glasses that he hated. “Who built it, and who’s there now?”
“The people who wanted to kill the whole fucking world,” Clark responded, reaching for his cell phone when it started chirping. Again he had to wait for the encryption system to handshake with the other end. “This is Clark,” he said finally.
“Ed Foley here, John. The sample was examined by the troops up at Fort Detrick.”
“And?”
“And it’s a version of the Ebola virus, they say, modified—‘engineered’ is the term they used, as a matter of fact—by the addition of what appears to be cancer genes. They say that makes the little bastard more robust. Moreover, the virus strands were encased in some sort of mini-capsules to help it survive in the open. In other words, John, what your Russian friend told you—it looks like it’s fully confirmed.”
“What did you do with Dmitriy?” Rainbow Six asked.
“A safe house out in Winchester,” the DCI replied. It was the usual place to quarter a foreign national the CIA wanted to protect. “Oh, the FBI tells me that the Kansas State Police are looking for him on a murder charge. Supposedly he killed one Foster Hunnicutt from the state of Montana, or so he has been accused.”
“Why don’t you have the Bureau tell Kansas that he didn’t kill anybody. He was with me the whole time,” Clark suggested. They had to take care of this man, didn’t they? John had already made the conceptual leap of forgetting that Popov had instigated an attack on his wife and daughter. Business, in this case, was business, and it wasn’t the first time a KGB enemy had turned into a valuable friend.
“Okay, yes, I can do that.” It was a little white lie, Foley agreed, set against a big black truth. In his Langley, Virginia, office, Foley wondered why his hands weren’t shaking. These lunatics had not only wanted to kill the whole world, but they’d also had the ability to do so. This was a new development the CIA would have to study in detail, a whole new type of threat, and investigating it would be neither easy nor fun.
“Okay, thanks, Ed.” Clark killed the phone and looked at the others in the room. “We just confirmed the contents of the chlorine canister. They created a modified form of Ebola for distribution.”
“What?” Colonel Byron asked. Clark gave him a ten-minute explanation. “You’re serious, eh?” he asked finally.
“As a heart attack,” Clark replied. “They hired Dmitriy Popov to interface with terrorists to set up incidents throughout Europe. That was to increase the fear of terrorism, to get Global Security the consulting contract for the Australians, and—”
“Bill Henriksen?” Colonel Byron asked. “Hell, I know that guy!”
“Yeah? Well, his people were supposed to deliver the bug through the fogging-cooling system at the Olympic stadium in Sydney, Willie. Chavez was there in the control room when this Wil Gearing guy showed up with the container, and the contents were checked out by the USAMRIID guys at Fort Detrick. You know, the FBI could almost make a criminal case out of this. But not quite,” Clark added.
“So, you’re heading down there to . . .”
“To talk to them, Willie,” Clark finished the statement for him. “They have the aircraft scrubbed yet?”
Byron checked his watch. “Ought to.”
“Then it’s time for us to get moving.”
“Okay. I have BDUs for all your people, John. Sure you don’t need a little help?”
“No, Willie. I appreciate the offer, but we want to keep this one tight, don’t we?”
“I suppose, John.” Byron stood. “Follow me, guys. Those folks you’re going to see in Brazil?”
“Yeah?” Clark said.
“Give them a special hello for JSOC, will ya?”
“Yes, sir,” John promised. “We’ll do that.”
The major aircraft sitting on the Pope Air Force Base ramp was an Air Force C-5B Galaxy transport, which the local ground crew had been working on for several hours. All official markings had been painted over, with HORIZON CORPORATION painted in the place of the USAF roundels. Even the tail number was gone. The clamshell cargo doors in the rear were being sealed now. Clark and Stanley got there first. The rest of the troops arrived by bus, carrying their personal gear, and they climbed into the passenger compartment aft of the wing box. From that point on, it was just a matter of having the flight crew—dressed in civilian clothing—climb up to the flight deck and commence start-up procedures as though they were a commercial flight. A KC-10 tanker would meet up with them south of Jamaica to top off their fuel tanks.
“Okay, so that’s what seems to have happened,” John Brightling told the people assembled in the auditorium. He saw disappointment on the faces of the other fifty-two people here, but some relief was evident as well. Well, even true believers had consciences, he imagined. Too bad.
“What do we do here, John?” Steve Berg asked. He’d been one of the senior scientists on the Project, developer of the “A” and “B” vaccines, who’d also helped to design Shiva. Berg was one of the best people Horizon Corporation had ever hired.
“We study the rain forest. We have destroyed everything of evidentiary value. The Shiva supply is gone. So are the vaccines. So are all the computer records of our laboratory notes, and so forth. The only records of the Project are what you people have in your heads. In other words, if anybody tries to make a criminal case against us, you just have to keep your mouths shut, and there will be no case. Bill?” John Brightling gestured to Henriksen, who walked to the podium.
“Okay, you know that I used to be in the FBI. I know how they make their criminal cases. Making one against us will not be easy under the best of circumstances. The FBI has to play by the rules, and they’re strict rules. They must read you your rights, one of which is to have a lawyer present during questioning. All you have to say is, ‘Yes, I want my lawyer here.’ If you say that, then they can’t even ask you what the time is. Then you call us, and we get a lawyer to you, and the lawyer will tell you, right in front of the case agents, that you will not talk at all, and he’ll tell the agents that you will not talk, and that if they try to make you talk then they’ve violated all sorts of statutes and Supreme Court decisions. That means that they can get into trouble, and anything you might say cannot be used anywhere. Those are your civil protections.
“Next,” Bill Henriksen went on, “we will spend our time here looking at the rich ecosystem around us, and formulating a cover story. That will take us some time and—”
“Wait, if we can avoid answering their questions, then—”
“Why concoct a cover story? That’s easy. Our lawyers will have to talk some with the United States attorneys. If we generate a plausible cover story, then we can make them go away. If the cops know they can’t win, they won’t fight. A good cover story will help with that. Okay, we can say that, yes, we were looking at the Ebola virus, because it’s a nasty little fucker, and the world needs a cure. Then, maybe, some loony employee decided to kill the world—but we had nothing to do with that. Why are we here? We’re here to do primary medical research into chemical compounds in the flora and fauna here in the tropical rain forest. That’s legitimate, isn’t it?” Heads nodded.
“Okay, we’ll take our time to construct an ironclad cover story. Then we’ll all memorize it. That way, when our lawyers let us talk to the FBI so that we can be cooperative, we give them only information which cannot hurt us, and will, in fact, help us evade the charges that they might hit us with. People, if we stand together and stick to our scripts, we can’t lose. Please believe me on that. We can’t lose if we use our heads. Okay?”
; “And we can also work on Project 2,” Brightling said, resuming the podium. “You are some of the smartest people in the world, and our commitment to our ultimate goal has not changed. We’ll be here for a year or so. It’s a chance for us to study nature, and learn things we need to learn. It will also be a year of working to find a new way to achieve that to which we have dedicated our lives,” he went on, seeing nods. There were already alternate ideas he could investigate, probably. He was still the chairman of the world’s foremost biotech company. He still had the best and brightest people in the world working for him. He and they still cared about saving the planet. They’d just have to find something else, and they had the resources and the time to do so.
“Okay,” Brightling told them, with a beaming smile. “It’s been a long day. Let’s all bed down and get some rest. Tomorrow morning, I’m going out in the forest to see an ecosystem that we all want to learn about.”
The applause moved him. Yes, all of these people cared as much as he did, shared his dedication—and, who knew, maybe there was a way for Project 2 to happen.
Bill Henriksen came up to John and Carol during the walk to their rooms. “There is one other potential problem.”
“What’s that?”
“What if they send a paramilitary team here?”
“You mean like the Army?” Carol Brightling asked.
“That’s right.”
“We fight them,” John responded. “We have guns here, don’t we?”
And that they did. The Project Alternate armory had no fewer than a hundred German-made G-3 military assault rifles, the real sort, able to go full-automatic, and quite a few of the people here knew how to shoot.
“Yes. Okay, the problem with this is, they can’t really arrest us legally, but if they do manage to apprehend us and get us back to America, then the courts won’t care that the arrests were illegal. That’s a point of American law—once you’re in front of the judge, that’s all the judge cares about. So, if people show up, we just have to discourage them. I think—”