The Fusion Cage (Warner & Lopez Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  Right now, unbeknown to the most powerful people in Las Vegas, Mary Meyer had her fingers curled tightly around their most prized possessions and was about to start squeezing.

  *

  ‘She could be anywhere.’

  Ethan drove slowly onto Las Vegas strip and saw the galaxy of lights stretching away before him, a highway of color amid the immense blackness of the Nevada desert.

  Lopez was right. Vegas was the perfect place for Mary Meyer to hide herself, to vanish amid the roiling crowds of tourists, card–sharks, drifters and addicts that made up so many of the city’s countless inhabitants. Whatever she had in mind, and Ethan felt certain that she did indeed have a plan, it was likely going to involve switching the lights off across one of the most famously excessive cities on the planet.

  ‘She’ll blow the power stations,’ Lopez guessed. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘But that’s just what bothers me, it doesn’t make sense. Everything that Stanley set out to achieve involved helping the ordinary people of the world, not plunging them into darkness. Mary must share the same passion, and blowing up power stations won’t achieve anything in the long run, unless … ’

  Ethan imagined the sight of Las Vegas in absolute darkness. Of course, the casinos and hotels would be able to run off generators for a while, a standard back–up system to prevent the immense loss of revenue from black–outs that afflicted all cities from time to time. But the control of that power, that ability to switch it on at will and not have to worry about revenue, was a different matter. The power companies could not do that because they would lose revenue themselves, be held to account, profits and shareholder confidence vanishing overnight. But Mary, if she did indeed have a second fusion cage, could hold the entire city to ransom and …

  ‘She’s not going to blow up the power stations,’ Ethan said. ‘That’s not her plan.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Lopez challenged. ‘Her husband was just murdered by the people she wants to stop. Revenge is a powerful motivator, believe me.’

  ‘She wants revenge all right,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but this has always been about hitting the corporations where it hurts the most – their pockets. She doesn’t want to destroy the city’s infrastructure, she’ll need it herself to distribute power from any fusion cage she might possess. She wants to shut down the power and then come to the rescue, to show the world that her husband was right, that Stanley Meyer was trying to save the planet and was murdered for his troubles.’

  Lopez’s dark eyes flew wide.

  ‘The solar array!’ she said suddenly. ‘Crescent Dunes, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the city’s back–up power source,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘Much of the power it produces is to light the Vegas Strip.’

  ‘But that’s solar power,’ Lopez frowned. ‘Why would she go there?’

  ‘That’s what she wants, the exposure, the visibility. The solar plant is iconic. If she’s figured out a way to demonstrate the fusion cage in action that nobody can deny, she’ll be untouchable–any attempt on her life will result in social unrest on a global scale.’

  Ethan grabbed the wheel of the car and swerved off the main strip as he sought a fresh route out of the city.

  ‘It’s past midnight,’ Lopez said as she glanced at her watch. ‘Whatever she’s going to do, it’s going to be soon.’

  Ethan’s cell phone rang as he drove and Lopez picked it up.

  ‘Ethan’s phone.’

  ‘I have a track for you,’ came the response, and although she had never met Hellerman, Lopez could guess from the digital hiss of distortion on the line that matched the one she had heard whenever she spoke to Jarvis that she was speaking to his faithful assistant.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It’s heading north on the I95 toward Tonopah, range twenty eight miles. The signal matches Amber’s cell phone.’

  ‘That’s toward the Crescent Dunes project,’ Lopez confirmed. ‘Amber must already know what Mary is about to do. But it could be a decoy, something to throw us off.’

  ‘We’ve got no choice but to follow her,’ Ethan said, raising his voice enough so that Hellerman could hear it. ‘There are no other leads right now and we can’t search the Vegas Strip, it would take weeks and we only have hours. We’ve got to take the chance that Amber’s letting us know where she’s going.’

  Lopez switched the cell to speakerphone as Hellerman replied.

  ‘I can offer you no further assistance. The KH–12 Keyhole satellite I tasked for this is already moving on toward other regions and is out of range and Jarvis is out of the loop completely. Even General Nellis isn’t playing ball any longer. Majestic Twelve, whoever they are, must have got to him somehow. In addition, according to transmissions intercepted recently, the FBI are on your tail again with agents deployed into Vegas and a BOLO out with local law enforcement. You’re on your own now, I’m afraid. Good luck, Hellerman out.’

  The line went dead and Lopez looked at Ethan.

  ‘On our own again. Color me surprised.’

  Ethan smiled grimly as he accelerated out of the Vegas Strip onto the I95.

  ***

  XXXIX

  Tonopah, Nevada

  ‘Bullseye, Spirit Twelve, inbound to Initial Point, request vectors.’

  The cockpit of the B2 Spirit Stealth bomber was shrouded in darkness, the instruments glowing a faint green through the pilot’s visor as he glanced briefly out of the cockpit windscreen at the immense night surrounding them. Major Pete Grady heard the voice of a fighter controller in his earpiece as he concentrated on his instruments, climbing through banks of broken stratus cloud that glowed a faint blue in the starlight as he climbed toward his assigned altitude.

  ‘Spirit Twelve, angels three two zero, maintain climb, no traffic.’

  ‘Three two zero, wilco, Spirit Twelve.’

  Beside him, the co–pilot was scrutinizing the displays, programming data into the aircraft’s surveillance system. Both of them knew of the immense importance of this mission, which had been recorded as a routine training flight out of Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. It was rare for B2s to deploy operationally into theatre, and even rarer for that theatre to be the continental United States, but this was an extraordinary mission born of an extraordinary detection just days ago over Missouri.

  Pete Grady had been able to analyse the data from the Spirit’s surveillance sensors before that data had been whisked away by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and although he would not have admitted it to another soul, not even his wife, what he had seen there had fairly scared the crap out of him. An energy burst of significant proportions, deep in the Missouri wilderness, that should have been worldwide news by now. At the time his first assumption had been an asteroid impact or another energetic cosmic event, but the emergence in the data of nuclear by–products including a small neutron burst in the wake of the event suggested a nuclear accident. That was quickly ruled out, as there were no nuclear sites nearby and besides, there was no smoking gun: no crater, no fires, no nothing.

  Whatever he and his co–pilot had detected that evening on their way back from a training flight, it had vanished completely. Now, with sensors adapted at no small cost to specifically locate that energy burst again, they were now airborne high over the Nevada desert having deployed to Groom Lake airbase, better known as Area 51, that very day. Pete Grady’s rank was not senior enough to ask too many questions, but it was obvious that the whatever–it–was they had detected was believed to still be present, and clearly the powers that be felt it was in Nevada.

  Area 51. Bright lights. High energy.

  Nobody was saying UFO, but he knew damned well everybody had been thinking it.

  Prior to their departure, they had been briefed on the presence of an unspecified weapon smuggled into the United States by insurgents from the Middle East. Powerful, dangerous, high technology that must be found at any cost. Lives, perhaps millions of li
ves, depended upon it. The orders came from the very, very top: locate and destroy.

  The desert below him glowed with the light from Las Vegas, a sparkling jewel of color encrusted into the darkness. Grady looked down at it, knowing that up here at forty thousand feet he was utterly invisible to the people below, that he was the UFO sneaking around in the upper atmosphere. The gigantic, wedge–shaped B2 looked like an enormous, angular black bat haunting the troposphere.

  ‘Sensors are set,’ his co–pilot, Scott Reed, reported. ‘We’re ready.’

  Grady checked the instruments one last time, made sure that he was ready for what could be a long night, and then nodded.

  ‘Activate,’ he ordered. ‘Let’s see what’s out there.’

  Reed switched the Spirit’s passive sensors on and then set them to “Active”, and moments later the radar displays began displaying images from the apparently empty desert below them.

  ‘Good morning, America,’ Reed said.

  The darkness was alive with tiny specks of light and heat detected by the immensely powerful sensors. Vehicles on roads, campers far out in the desert, asphalt roads still glowing with residual heat from the previous day’s sunshine like arteries flowing in an X–ray. But amid the countless specks of heat a single spot of bright blue–white shone like a new born star almost right in the centre of the main display on the cockpit before Grady.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Reed studied the display, isolating the glow.

  ‘It’s the solar tower at Crescent Dunes,’ he reported. ‘Must still be much hotter than the surrounding area. Don’t they have melted salts or something, heated by the solar arrays?’

  Grady watched the display. He knew that solar towers glowed throughout the night and were extremely bright objects when compared with the rapidly cooling deserts that so often surrounded them, but there was something about this one …

  ‘Can you isolate and grab a spectrographic display?’ he asked. ‘If anyone was trying to hide a weapon down there, that hot spot would be the perfect place to do it.’

  Reed began altering the filters on the optical sensors until he was able to display a spectrographic read–out on Grady’s screen. The image had switched to one that portrayed the elements contained within the heat source far below them: all light had a signature that could be split and studied to determine what chemical components were contained within. Grady stared down at the read out and frowned.

  ‘Hydrogen, oxygen, palladium, lithium,’ Reed reported, ‘nothing unusual at all.’

  Grady’s mind tried to determine what he was seeing. There was almost certainly water down there, which one might expect from the steam boiling off the turbines at the plant. As far as he could recall, most solar plants used the heated salts to boil water to turn steam–turbines, so some airborne exhaust would be expected. But palladium and lithium? He had heard of lithium salts but palladium was often used in catalytic converters and fuel cells, where hydrogen and oxygen were combined to produce heat, electricity and water.

  ‘It’s a solar tower,’ Reed said. ‘That’s the kind of technology we’d expect to find in an installation like that, right? Green stuff, no pollutants?’

  Grady nodded, still thinking. Their orders were to search and destroy, but he was also aware that the Crescent Dunes solar array was quite a famous installation. Built using government money and costing billions of dollars, dropping a few thousand pounds of high–explosive ordnance on such an installation would create political devastation in so many ways that Grady could not begin to calculate the consequences of such an action. The fall–out would be incalculable, and if covered by a story of an explosion or similar could render the solar industry redundant and perhaps even bring down the administration that funded the projects.

  The perfect place, then, to hide a weapon from aerial bombardment.

  ‘Search for another solar tower and use the spectrograph again,’ Grady ordered. ‘I want to compare the data and see if what we’ve got here isn’t being used to hide something.’

  ‘I’ve already got one in the data set,’ Reed replied. ‘Ivanpah, down in the Mojave desert. We flew overhead on the way to Groom Lake yesterday.’

  Reed got to work immediately, pulling out the relevant data sets and comparing them to the crescent dunes signal from far below. Reed studied them for a moment and then looked at his pilot.

  ‘No palladium,’ he said. ‘According to our data file the Ivanpah site uses much the same tower technology as Crescent Dunes, but no salts – it heats water directly.’

  Grady looked at the displays and the sensors for a moment longer.

  ‘Call it in,’ he said finally. ‘We can’t bomb the damned tower, but somebody needs to get down there and check it out real fast.’

  As Reed called their findings in to Groom Lake on a secure channel, Grady wondered just what the hell these terrorists had down there, and what on earth they were doing putting it up on top of a three hundred foot solar tower.

  *

  ‘All units, stand by.’

  Special Agent Hannah Ford gripped her vehicle’s radio switch tighter than was necessary as she watched her rear view mirror. Bright lights illuminated the huge pipes, conduits and towers that made up Las Vegas’s Edward Clark Generating Station, the sky beyond deep black.

  The vehicles were concealed behind a slip road onto the I65, looking north east over wire fences at transformers and power cables strung from metal towers that hummed in the warm night air.

  ‘Why would Assim come here?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘His vehicle turned up here an hour ago,’ Hannah replied. ‘All we can do is try to figure out what his game plan is and hope we can intercept him.’

  ‘We’ve got movement.’

  Agent Vaughn nodded discreetly to Hannah’s left, and she slowly turned her head to see several figures skulking along the fences outside the plant, hugging the shadows, crouched low and carrying bags.

  ‘This is it,’ she whispered once more into her microphone. ‘Be ready to move on my mark.’

  Ten agents from the Las Vegas Field Office were positioned around the plant, each in vehicles parked discreetly in side alleys and nearby roads, concealed by shadows. As Hannah watched the half–dozen figures skirting the edge of the power plant, she saw them stop and produce a large pair of bolt–croppers. Within moments, they were through the fence and inside the plant.

  ‘They’re going for it,’ Mickey said urgently.

  ‘Units one through three, take the front entrance,’ Hannah ordered. ‘The rest of you, with me! They’ll go for the towers. Go now!’

  Hannah shoved her door open and dashed out across the street to where the figures had sliced open the fences and slipped inside. The ground was dusty and hard, baked for decades by the fearsome desert sun as Hannah ran hard in pursuit of the figures she could see ahead of her, their shadows cast long by the powerful lighting of the station. She could hear Agent Vaughn right behind her, sprinting to keep up.

  ‘They’re going to drop the towers,’ he gasped, ‘the ones leading into Vegas.’

  Hannah ran harder, saw the figures huddle around the base of the first tower they reached and begin unpacking their bags. Visions of high explosives shattering the legs of the towers and bringing Las Vegas to its knees raced through Hannah’s mind as she ran and drew her pistol from its holster beneath her left arm.

  ‘FBI! Freeze!’

  The figures looked up at her, faces concealed by bandanas, but to her amazement they continued unpacking their bags and hurrying to secure something to the legs of the tower. Hannah heard the hum of the power lines as she dashed beneath them, saw other agents converging on her position through the plant.

  ‘On your knees, hands where I can see them!’

  Hannah skidded to a halt before the terrorists, her pistol held in both hands and pointed at them. Mickey Vaughn dashed to her side, covering her with his own weapon as from their right more agents rushed in, all armed.

 
The terrorists looked at the agents and as one they stood up and raised their hands.

  Hannah checked that she was covered and then she strode forward to the nearest of the terrorists and yanked the bandana from his face. To her amazement, instead of Assim Khan’ rugged features a young girl stared back at her, fresh faced like she was just out of college.

  ‘Hello,’ the girl said.

  As Hannah watched, one by one every single one of the terrorists removed their bandanas to reveal young, college–aged faces. Hannah had never seen a more innocent looking bunch of kids, pinned down as they were now before a dozen armed federal agents.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ Hannah demanded, fearful of some kind of suicidal cult.

  The girl’s smile broadened.

  ‘Nothing but banners protesting against our abuse of the planet’s limited resources,’ she replied softly. ‘You can check the bags if you want.’

  Hannah’s mind whirled as she tried to figure out just what the hell was going on.

  ‘Banners?’

  ‘Banners,’ the girl repeated. ‘I was told to give you a message.’ Hannah stared at the girl, speechless, as she went on. ‘Wrong place, wrong people, wrong time.’

  Hannah stared at the bags, at the supposed terrorists before them, and a creeping fear swelled inside her.

  ‘Oh no,’ was all that she could utter.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Vaughn demanded.

  ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ Hannah gasped, then whirled and shouted at the FBI team.

  ‘Arrest them all and get us out of here! Assim’s target is not in Las Vegas!’

  Hannah stormed back the way she had come, Vaughn at her side.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to know?!’ Hannah snarled back.

  Vaughn slowed, and Hannah forced herself to take a breath and stop walking. She closed her eyes for a moment and turned to face him. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do next, okay?’