Speculation about the facility’s true purpose has been rampant. Morgan knew that its widely believed function as an ECHELON listening post was correct. The NSA ECHELON program samples cell phone, email, and text messages from around the world for any specific keywords deemed critical to protecting US interests, and Pine Gap is important for communicating with satellites orbiting over the southern hemisphere. But few knew of the facility’s other role in preparing weapons to be evaluated at the Woomera Test Range.
“When can we start the briefing?” Morgan said.
“Follow me and I’ll show you to an office you can use while you’re here. Then I’ll need to instruct my people where the equipment from the truck should go. It ought to take about ten minutes. When I’m done, we’ll begin the briefing.”
He took them inside the structure and guided them to a small room with two desks and chairs. After giving them the security password to the internal WiFi system, Kessler walked out.
Vince leaned over to Morgan. “What’s your secret?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been in the air for twenty-four hours, and you look like you’re ready to run a marathon. I’m about to keel over.”
Morgan shrugged. “I don’t need much sleep.”
“That’s it? You don’t need much sleep?”
“Right.”
They both sat and started setting up their laptops to securely access the OSI network when the door opened and Collins poked his head in.
The technician scanned the room. “I thought Dr. Kessler might be here.”
“He just left. Is there a problem?”
“No, I just need to let him know that we’re ready to receive the Killswitch.”
Morgan looked at Vince in confusion, then back to Collins.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Wasn’t the Killswitch coming separately from the semi?”
“Yes,” Vince said. “Kessler said you were expecting it.”
“I am,” Collins said with a puzzled look. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”
“Isn’t it here already?” Morgan said. She and Vince stood. Something was very wrong here.
Collins looked as if he were being asked a trick question. “If the Killswitch was here, I wouldn’t be telling you we’re ready to receive it.”
“The truck left ten minutes before we did,” Vince said. “Josephson was with it. He should have been here by now.”
“Are you sure the Killswitch truck isn’t somewhere in the facility?” Morgan said.
Collins nodded slowly, his face dawning with horrified comprehension. “I’m absolutely positive. The truck with the Killswitch on board never arrived.”
* * *
While Zotkin drove the van, Colchev sat at the control station in back. Although they were six miles behind the road train, the video feed from the cab allowed Colchev to monitor the truck’s progress on its suicide mission. He had a driver’s eye view of the road, only eleven miles of which were left before it reached its destination. More cameras on either side gave him panoramic views to the left and right. When the truck blasted through the Pine Gap gate, which would prove no match for the massive protective steel bullbar frame over the engine bay, he’d be able to see it wend its way into the center of the complex before the contents of the four trailers blew the facility off the map. Then his plan to bring victory to Russia over America would be inexorably underway.
Colchev’s training kept him from shaking with anticipation, but his muscles ached from the tension he forced himself to contain. There was no going back now. Either he would succeed spectacularly or he would compound the failure that had brought him to this desperate position in the first place.
But that desperate position gave him strength. Nothing would stop him because he had nothing to live for if the mission was a failure. He had warned Nadia not to pursue him, but she had always been stubborn. He once thought he’d loved her, but he realized long ago that a man like him had no use for such feelings. Then she had shown up at the warehouse, just as he’d suspected she would but hoped she wouldn’t. It had been disappointingly easy for his men to catch her team in an ambush.
That had always been Bedova’s weakness, thinking she was better than Colchev was.
Now that he’d been forced to wipe out her team, he would become enemy number one to his former masters. But a successful mission would convince them that the deaths had been necessary, that they had resulted in a greater good. He would be able to return to his Mother Russia with honor. Any other outcome was unacceptable. Then he would remain an embarrassment to his country, a pariah consigned to a fate worse than death.
Colchev pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the present. The only thing that mattered was making sure the road train reached its destination. Once it did, the rest of the mission would be relatively easy, and he would have free rein to carry out the ultimate attack with impunity.
Through the windshield of the truck cab, he could see the white Ford sedan a half-mile ahead of the road train, providing escort until the truck exited from the public highway. Two men inside the car were on the lookout for any potential interference, primarily from the police. Once the truck made its turn, there would be no reason for the car to accompany it onto the private road. Colchev would then guide it the rest of the way.
He noticed on the GPS map that the gap between the truck and van was growing.
“Speed up,” Colchev said to Zotkin. “You’re falling behind.”
“Yes, sir,” Zotkin replied.
Colchev felt the van accelerate and turned back to the monitor. He was annoyed to see that his men’s pace car was decelerating.
He leaned forward. “Escort One,” he said into the mic to the car’s driver, Gurevich, “why are you slowing? Keep the interval at five hundred meters.”
“Sir, I don’t know how it happened,” Gurevich said, the concern in his voice evident. “We’ve been watching the entire time, and no vehicles have approached.”
“What are you babbling about? Is there a police car there?”
“No, sir. There’s a man on top of the truck.”
Colchev adjusted his earpiece. “What are you saying?”
“I can see someone walking along the top of the trailers. He just jumped from the second trailer to the first.”
Colchev shook his head in shock. This was not happening. If he was hearing Gurevich right, someone had stowed away on the truck. But when? All the trailer doors were locked, and the professor and his student had been injected with enough sedative at the CAPEK facility to knock them out for hours. The two men hadn’t been shot during the abduction because telltale blood splatters might have raised alarms at CAPEK. But Nadia Bedova and her men had come along and forced him to leave a mess behind.
Colchev suddenly realized the stowaway must be one of Bedova’s men. She was smarter than he gave her credit for.
“Send the order to stop the truck,” Gurevich said, “and we will kill him.”
“No. That truck stops for nothing. You will have to take the intruder out while it’s in motion.” The road train was only fifteen kilometers from the target, and with the bodies they’d left behind in the warehouse, they were committed. Any delay would make it easier for authorities to intercept the truck if the stowaway had called for help.
“Will we set off the explosives with a stray shot?”
Colchev thought that scenario was extremely unlikely. ANFO was a stable explosive, and a bullet impact would have no effect. Colchev was more worried about an errant round disabling the robotic truck’s control system.
“Do not shoot unless fired upon,” Colchev said. “Escort Two will have to get on the truck and eliminate him. You will not deviate until the task is accomplished. Understood?”
There was a pause on the other end. The Ford was now close enough to the road train that Colchev could see the men on his monitor, conferring in the car. The passenger, Lvov, didn’t gesticulate or get upse
t. He knew his job. Gurevich was just outlining the plan to him.
“Understood,” Gurevich replied to Colchev. “We’ll pull alongside the cab and Escort Two will climb on.”
Colchev saw the sign for the coming intersection a kilometer in the distance.
“You’re approaching the turnoff. The truck will slow to turn. Your best chance will be right before it speeds up again.”
“Acknowledged.”
The road train began to slow, and the nose of the cab dipped as the brakes were applied more abruptly than Colchev expected. It must have also been more sudden than the man on the truck expected because he fell onto the hood of the vehicle, filling the windscreen and blocking Colchev’s monitor view with the back of his leather jacket.
The man flipped over and clutched at the lip of the hood to keep himself from sliding off, bracing himself with his feet against the tubular bullbar, the Australian version of a cow catcher. At first all Colchev could see was the top of the man’s head, his brown hair whipped by the wind. To stretch the length of the hood, the man had to be at least six feet tall—big enough to pose a problem for Lvov.
The stowaway looked up, and Colchev saw blue eyes peering back at him through the video camera. Colchev stared in stunned disbelief when he recognized the man as Tyler Locke.
How had Locke had ended up here? Colchev wanted to reach through the screen and throttle him, but he was six miles away, helpless to do anything himself.
He leaned forward, his own eyes never leaving Locke’s. He spoke slowly and distinctly into the microphone so that Gurevich would have no doubt that dying would be preferable to failure.
“I don’t care how you do it,” Colchev said, “but get that bastard off my truck.”
TWENTY-ONE
Even as he was trying to keep himself from sliding off the hood and getting crushed by the road train’s eighty tires, Tyler couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the truck’s empty cab. Invisible hands made minute adjustments to the steering wheel.
I guess it’s getting harder to find suicide bombers these days, he thought.
Tyler marveled at the engineering involved in creating a two-hundred-ton remote-control truck. Then the howling wind reminded him he was in danger of becoming outback roadkill, and he looked for a way off the hood.
The situation hadn’t turned out exactly as he’d planned. It had been Tyler’s bright idea to jam the pliers of his Leatherman multi-tool into the trailer’s rear door track to hold it open while he gripped the door’s handle to pull himself onto the roof. Although Grant steadied him as he scrambled up, the abrupt encounter with the airstream nearly blew him onto the asphalt. Once Tyler was safely up and found his footing, he’d run along the trailer roofs, leaving Grant to implement their backup plan.
Tyler intended to climb down next to the cab’s door, but while he was still on its roof, the road train had unexpectedly slowed, tossing him onto the hood instead.
Tyler swiveled his head to see why the truck was slowing. He squinted at a white car that turned off the highway just in front of him. It looked like the truck would follow.
As the road train made its turn, Tyler used the momentum to swing his legs over to the side and down onto the running board. With one hand on the mirror, he maneuvered over to the door handle. He pulled on it and realized he shouldn’t have been surprised to find it unlocked. Colchev wasn’t expecting stowaways on board.
He got into the cab and searched the interior for a simple DISENGAGE button, but he couldn’t see one. In the middle of the dashboard was an LCD screen the size of a laptop’s. He touched the dark screen, and a window lit up with the CAPEK logo.
Having successfully negotiated the turn, the road train accelerated again. A sign flashed by.
NO THROUGH ROAD
JOINT DEFENCE FACILITY PINE GAP
PROHIBITED AREA
TURN AROUND NOW
Tyler had never heard of Pine Gap, but it sounded like the kind of place a terrorist would want to target. He had no doubt security cameras along the road had already spotted the truck, but they might think it was just a shipment to the base that hadn’t been properly recorded on the schedule. Guards would try to wave him down at the front gate and only realize their mistake when it barreled through. Stopping the truck before it got there was Tyler’s best option.
Tyler scanned the screen hoping for an obvious solution to his predicament. A button at the bottom said MENU. Tyler tapped on it, and an inscrutable list of acronyms and commands filled the screen. It would take some study to figure out what series of commands led to the STOP command, so Tyler did what he thought would shut down most any cruise control.
He jammed his foot on the brake pedal.
The truck began to slow, but he could feel the accelerator fighting him. Either the auto-shutoff had been disabled or Colchev was in the van countermanding his efforts.
Tyler tried turning the wheel to jackknife the truck, but it spun freely in his hand. Normally a truck’s steering was controlled by a rack-and-pinion mechanism, but the CAPEK vehicle’s steering was drive-by-wire, controlled by a computer that sent commands from the steering wheel to a motor adjusting the position of the front wheels. The drive-by-wire system had been disengaged.
Tyler looked for an ignition key but found only a red START button. Pressing it had no effect. He pushed the brake pedal as hard as he could, and the road train slowed to ten miles per hour.
The walkie-talkie on Tyler’s cell phone squawked.
“Tyler,” Grant said. “You there?”
“I’m here and inside the cab.”
“So you’re stopping us?”
“Not exactly. We’ll have to go with plan B. Get Stevens and Beech out of there.”
“Will do,” Grant said. He’d have to drop them off the back of the truck and hope the speed would be low enough to prevent serious injury.
“Is the device ready?” Tyler said.
“Almost. I just wanted to let you know I’d be incommunicado momentarily. I’ll be out of here in thirty seconds. Can you keep us crawling for that long?”
“Will do. Should give us plenty of open space.”
“And remember. Do not call me.”
“Got it,” Tyler said and hung up.
A face popped up in the driver’s side window. Tyler had been so distracted that he’d lost track of the white car. The man outside with the thin nose and hideous underbite had climbed aboard to expel Tyler.
Colchev’s man ripped the door open, and Tyler gave him some assistance. Tyler pushed the door wider, slamming it out of the man’s hand and throwing him off balance. But he recovered easily and lunged inside, grasping Tyler in a chokehold.
Tyler kept his foot on the brake pedal as long as he could, but with his neck lodged in the crook of his assailant’s arm, his vision tunneled at a rapid pace. He threw an elbow backward with little effect, and he couldn’t use his other hand or he’d lose his grip on the cell phone. With only seconds before he blacked out, Tyler twisted in the man’s grip and launched himself through the driver’s side door, landing on the hood of the white sedan.
The surprised driver swerved and slowed as he brought a pistol to bear. Tyler rolled so that he would land in the dirt and not on the blacktop where he’d be drawn under the truck’s wheels. Bullets blasting through the windshield missed him as he tumbled off the car and onto the hardpan, shielding his head from the impact, but subjecting his arms and legs to a multitude of bumps and bruises. He winced as he sat up and opened his palm to see that the phone was still intact.
The car accelerated away to catch up with the cab. Tyler turned and saw Grant fifty yards behind him waving. Two limp forms lay next to him.
Tyler sprinted toward Grant and pointed at a boulder the size of a Volkswagen beside the road.
“Get to cover!” he shouted.
Grant gave the thumbs-up and picked up one of the men as if he were no heavier than a feather pillow. Tyler ran to the other man and saw that he was the smaller o
f the two, Professor Stevens. Tyler threw the dead weight onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and hustled behind the boulder.
When he reached the relative safety of the rock, Tyler lay Stevens down and gasped for air.
“Glad you could join us,” Grant said, and looked at the car driving alongside the cab of the accelerating truck. “They with the Auto Club?”
Tyler nodded. “And they’re very upset about what we’ve done to their truck.”
“So we’re not too excited about seeing them again?”
“I think they’d let their guns do the talking.”
The man who’d jumped Tyler was now perched on the running board, looking for a graceful way back into the car. Colchev obviously wasn’t planning on stopping to let him off.
“How much distance you figure we need?” Grant said.
“I’d like two miles, but I don’t think we’re going to get it.”
The man leaped onto the top of the car, which immediately began to slow down. The truck, which was now more than a mile from Tyler and Grant, sped away from the sedan.
“It’s now or never,” Tyler said. They both crouched behind the boulder, covering Stevens and Beech. If this didn’t work, they’d only have seconds to warn Pine Gap before those men returned to finish them off.
Tyler waited for Grant to cover his ears, then pressed the TALK button on the phone and covered his own.
Grant’s phone was now hooked up in an electrical circuit with one of the detonators sitting in an ANFO barrel in the back of the truck. It received Tyler’s signal and sent a current through the detonator.
The world ripped apart as if a volcano had erupted in the middle of the desert. The deafening blast, louder than a thousand sonic booms, shattered the air and transformed the earth into an undulating ocean of dirt and sand.
Even with the boulder protecting them, Tyler could see the reflected glow of the gigantic fireball through his closed eyelids. His bones rattled from the overpressure wave, and the heat from the explosion singed his hair.
The Roswell Conspiracy Page 12