by Tom Clancy
“A virus just got past our firewall. It’s attacking the mainframe!”
5
“Silence those alarms, Anna,” Lambert ordered.
The room went quiet.
“How’s this possible?” Lambert asked. “This is the NSA, for God’s sake, not eBay. How could something get past our firewalls?”
“The laptop,” Fisher murmured.
Grimsdottir nodded, eyes fixed on the screen. “You got it. Colonel, there was a virus buried in one of the hard drive’s sectors. A worm, designed to come alive as soon as it detected a connection with any of the laptop’s ports. As soon as I hooked it up to run diagnostics—”
“Can you stop it?”
“Working on it. It’s moving fast, spreading through the mainframe. I’m trying to get ahead of it… set up a firebreak. If I can divert it into a unused server, I can trap it. Damn, it’s moving fast!”
For the next fifteen minutes Fisher and Lambert watched in silence as she worked. Blocks of green-on-black computer code streamed across the monitor. Grimsdottir’s hands became a blur on the keyboard. Slowly the code seemed to lose momentum, coming in erratic bursts, until finally she leaned back and exhaled. Her face glistened with sweat. Her hands were shaking.
“I got it,” she said. “It’s trapped on an empty archive server.”
“How much damage did it do?” Lambert asked.
“A lot, but it didn’t reach the backup systems, so we’ll be able to rebuild most of the mainframe.”
“And the laptop?” Fisher asked.
“Gone. Well and truly dead. One piece of good news, though: There’s only a few people in the world with the voodoo it takes to write that kind of virus. Give me a day, and I’ll have a name.”
“Go,” Lambert ordered.
* * *
Once she was gone, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I have an idea about the Trego.”
“I’m listening.”
“I don’t buy the Liberia registration.”
“Me neither.”
“You can disguise a ship in a lot of ways, but there’s one thing you can’t hide: the engine serial numbers. They’re stamped everywhere. Here’s the rub, though: The FBI will eventually find the numbers and eventually the info will trickle down to us—”
Lambert grinned. “I hate the word eventually.”
In this case, “eventually” could mean weeks of bureaucratic wrangling. Fisher returned Lambert’s smile. “Me too.”
Fisher had known Lambert for nearly twenty years, having first worked with him in the Army’s Delta Force, then again as they were both tapped for an experimental program that took special ops soldiers from each branch of the military and transferred them to counterpart units. Rangers went to Delta; Delta went to Marine Force Recon; and in Fisher and Lambert’s case, Delta went to the U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare Sea-Air-Land unit — the SEALs. The idea was to create operators of the highest caliber, trained to be the elite of the military’s special forces community.
Lambert said, “As luck would have it, I’ve already had this discussion with the President. The FBI’s taking the lead on the case, but we’ve been cleared to conduct our own parallel investigation — separate from the FBI.”
Fisher understood the order. While he loathed politics in general and did his best to stay out of it, he knew what was driving the President’s caution: the war in Iraq. Someone had just launched an attack on the U.S. that could have killed thousands of people and rendered a section of the Virginia shoreline radioactive for decades, perhaps centuries. So far, the only suspect was a lone man of Middle Eastern descent aboard the Trego. If America was headed toward another war in the Middle East, the President didn’t want another intelligence fiasco. America had just started rebuilding the credibility it had lost over Iraq. It would be Third Echelon’s job to make doubly sure all t’s were crossed and i’s were dotted.
“Restrictions?” Fisher asked.
“None,” Lambert replied. “We do it our way; gloves off.”
“The only way to fly.”
“Amen. Now, go get some sleep. Tomorrow night, you’re breaking into a U.S. naval base.”
* * *
Fisher lived outside Germantown, Maryland, about thirty minutes northwest of Washington, in a small farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine. He’d tried living a normal bachelor life: a townhouse, socializing with neighbors, sitting around the pool… But he’d quickly admitted what he already knew in the back of his mind: He wasn’t much of a people person. Not that he disliked people per se, but he had a limited tolerance for most of them.
It was a hazard that came with the job. Dealing with the worst of men in the worst of situations tended to change you. Living in the condo, Fisher had found himself mentally dissecting both his neighbors and his surroundings: threat or no threat; likely ambush sites; clear lines of fire… Living on the razor’s edge, while often exciting, was also all-consuming. You didn’t survive long in special operations without fully immersing yourself in that world. Not having a home where he could let down his guard and decompress had gotten very old, very quickly.
At the farmhouse, his closest neighbor was half a mile away. He could sit on his porch at night and hear nothing but the hum of the cicadas and the croaking of frogs. Surprisingly, he’d found the land itself therapeutic. He’d bought the property at a deep discount from an owner who’d allowed it to fall into disrepair, so he spent much of his time working at taming the landscaping or restoring the farmhouse, which needed new everything, from windows to shingles to plumbing. Fisher took comfort in the work — in the ordinariness of it all. Even the briefest of layovers at the farmhouse between missions helped recharge his batteries.
By the time he got home it was near dawn. He threw in a load of laundry, took a shower, checked his e-mail, and stretched out on the couch. He found the remote and turned on the TV. The channel was set to CNN.
“… what few initial eyewitness reports we’ve come across talk of dozens of people collapsing where they were standing or slumping over at the dining table… ”
Fisher sat bolt upright. He turned up the volume.
“The spokesperson for the governor’s office issued a statement stating that investigators were en route to the small town of Slipstone and that the governor himself would be holding a press conference later this morning. Meanwhile, speculation abounds as to what may be behind the sudden and mysterious deaths in the remote town of Slipstone, New Mexico.”
Fisher felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. His cell phone started ringing.
* * *
He was back at Situation Room forty minutes later. Lambert stood at the conference table watching an MSNBC report. Grimsdottir and Redding were seated at workstations on either side of him. In the background Fisher heard the static hiss of radio punctuated by a female voice:
“Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold… Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold… Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold… ”
Lambert looked over his shoulder at Fisher. “Two hundred emergency calls and counting. As far as we can decipher, there are hundreds dead. They’re laying in the streets, in homes, dead at their steering wheels… ”
“Good God,” Fisher murmured.
Grimsdottir called, “I’ve got it, Colonel.”
“Put it up.”
The main monitor resolved into a thermal satellite image of what Fisher assumed was Slipstone.
“Give me the overlay, Anna.”
Grimsdottir tapped the keyboard and the image changed to a maze of yellow and orange lines punctuated by circular blooms of red. To Fisher the colors looked eerily familiar. Already guessing the answer, he asked, “What are we seeing, Colonel?”
“Slipstone’s water system.”
“There’re only a few ways that many people can die that quickly: waterborne or airborne.”
His eyes still fixed on the monitor, Lambert nodded grimly. “How long, Anna?”
“Almost there,
Colonel.” A few moments later: “Confirmed: it’s the same signature as the Trego.”
Fisher felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He turned away from the screen and took a deep breath. The Trego had just been the opening salvo. This was the real event.
Someone had just poisoned an entire American town.
6
NORFOLK NAVAL SHIPYARD, HAMPTON ROADS, VIRGINIA
Fisher angled downward until his depth gauge read thirty feet, then leveled off and checked his OPSAT. He was on track, almost dead center in the middle of the Elizabeth River. A quarter mile to go. His rebreather unit hissed softly in his ears. As it always did, the sound reminded Fisher of a mellower version of Darth Vader.
Displayed across his facemask was a HUD, or Heads-Up Display. Like the display projected onto the windscreen of a modern jet fighter, the faint green overlay on his face mask told him virtually everything he needed to know about his environment, including a map of the river and the shipyard, his current position, the river’s depth and temperature, and distance and bearing to his next waypoint, which showed as a yellow arrow near the upper edge of his mask that changed position and length according to his position. Follow the yellow brick arrow.
Deciding best how to penetrate the shipyard’s Southgate Annex, one of the most secure yards on the Eastern Seaboard, had been the easiest part of his mission. Given the high level of base security, an approach by land was a nonstarter, which had left only one other option: water. This suited Fisher’s preference. His SEAL days had taught him to trust the water. Water was safety; water was camouflage; water was anonymity.
Norfolk Naval Shipyard is one of the busiest in the country, servicing on any given day as much as fifteen percent of the U.S. Navy’s fleet. With seven thousand employees, five hundred acres, and sixty-nine production buildings, the shipyard was an impressive site — more so since it was located eight miles south of the Norfolk Naval Station proper, in the southern branch of the relatively quiet Elizabeth River.
An hour earlier Fisher had parked his car in a wooded parking lot overlooking the eastern bank of the river, and waited until a teenage couple in a steamed-up Ford Escort finished their business and drove off. He’d then retrieved his duffel and walked a few hundred yards through the woods to the shoreline, where he changed into his wet suit, rebreather harness, mask, and fins, then slipped into the water.
Now Fisher craned his head back, checking the surface for boats. It was two A.M. He’d seen virtually no traffic, save for the occasional civilian motor cruiser returning home late after a day of fishing in the Chesapeake. He finned upward and broke the surface, careful to allow only the upper half of his mask to show. To his right, upriver, he could see car headlights crossing the Jordan Bridge, which linked the western and eastern shores.
Directly in front of him, a quarter mile across the water, the shipyard’s Southgate Annex was brightly lit by sodium-vapor lights. Fisher counted ten ships of various sizes, from frigates to refrigerator ships, moored at the piers, and here and there he could see the sparkle of welding torches. A loudspeaker crackled to life and a voice made an annoucement, too distorted for Fisher to hear. As long as the message wasn’t “Intruder in the water,” he didn’t care.
South of the main line of piers was a row of five man-made inlets, each covered by a hangarlike structure fronted by a massive rolling door wide enough to accommodate warships as large as cruisers. These were the annex’s secure docks, or sheds, numbered one through five. The Trego had been towed into Secure Shed Four, Five being the last in the line.
To reach her, Fisher would have to first have to get past the annex’s sea fence, which stretched some three hundred yards across the entrance to the annex and was marked by a line of blue-lighted buoys, each linked to the next by floating aluminum pipes.
Of course, it wasn’t the fence itself that concerned Fisher, but rather the spotlight-equipped Navy speedboat that constantly patrolled its length.
He picked out a few landmarks he’d chosen from his map before the mission, confirmed their position on his HUD display, then flipped over and dove.
* * *
Ten minutes later, he stopped swimming and coasted to a stop. He adjusted the compensator on his vest until he was neutrally buoyant, hovering motionless in the water. Aside from the glow of his HUD, he was surrounded by absolute blackness. Night diving could be an exercise in mind control, Fisher knew. Without any external reference points, a vertigo-like confusion can quickly take over. Fisher had seen the bravest of men, divers with hundreds of hours of bottom time, panic while simply floating motionless in dark water. Even he could feel it nipping at the edges of his mind: a primal urge to rush to the surface. He quashed the feeling and focused on his face mask; the soft green glow was reassuring. If his navigation was accurate, the sea fence lay directly ahead.
To his right he heard a the muffled chugging of a marine engine. Fifty yards away the gray, teardrop-shaped hull of the patrol boat was cutting across the surface, parallel to the fence. The boat’s wake fanned out behind it, spreading outward until it met the fence, where it curled back on itself and slowly dissolved. A spotlight clicked on and pierced the surface, turning the water around it turquoise.
Fisher waited until the boat crossed his front, then swam ahead. He had two minutes until the patrol boat returned. The sea fence appeared out of the gloom, a steel-cable net that stretched from its anchor bolts in the seabed to the linked buoys on the surface. Looking at the net, Fisher said a silent thanks to EPA, which had years earlier urged the Navy’s secure facilities to change the gap width of its sea fences so the indigenous fish population could come and go freely. In this case, the gaps were a foot square, which made Fisher’s job much easier.
He checked the time display in the upper-right-hand corner of his mask. Even as he did so he heard the chug of the patrol boat to his left. He flipped over and dove straight down, hand trailing over the fence until he reached the bottom. The boat passed overhead, spotlight arcing through the water and playing over the fence. Once it was gone, he ascended ten feet and went to work.
From his harness he pulled a “burn tie,” an eight-inch length of magnesium primacord. Ignited, magnesium burned hot and fast at five thousand degrees Fahrenheit, cutting through virtually anything it touched like a scalpel through jello.
He curled the tie around the cable before him, then jammed his thumbnail into the chemical detonator at the end and backed away. There was a half-second flash of blinding white light; the fence disappeared in a cloud of bubbles. When they cleared, Fisher swam ahead. The cable had been sheared neatly in two, turning the foot-wide gap into a two-foot-wide gap. He took off his rebreather harness, pushed it through the hole, then swam on.
* * *
Ten minutes later he drew to a stop in front of shed’s steel door, a wall of corrugated metal painted battleship gray. He flipped himself upside down and finned downward. He switched on his task light.
The muddy seabed appeared before his faceplate. He turned horizontal and banked right. He passed the right edge of the door and then, abruptly, there it was: a circular scuttle set into the wall. He reached out and tried the hand wheel. Predictably, it was locked and, according to Grimsdottir, alarmed. If he tampered with it, he’d find himself surrounded by patrol boats before he got a hundred yards away.
“Anyone home?” Fisher radioed.
“I’m here, Sam,” Grimsdottir replied.
“I’m at the hatch.”
“Okay,” Grimsdottir replied. “Give me thirty seconds. I’m hacked into the Shed’s control room, but they’ve got the locks on an eight-digit public key encryption—”
“That’s nice, Anna, but maybe we save the technobabble for another day?”
“Yeah, sorry, hang on.” She was back a minute later: “Okay, locks and alarms are disengaged.”
“Going in,” Fisher replied.
The hand wheel was well oiled and it turned smoothly under his grip. He spun it until he heard
the soft clank of metal on metal, then gently pulled. The scuttle swung open. Arms extended before him, he swam through.
His fins had barely cleared the opening when suddenly he heard the muffled shriek of alarm klaxons. In the distance, a water-muffled voice came over the loudspeaker: “Intruder alert… intruder alert. Security Alert Team to armory. This is not a drill! I say again: This is not a drill… ”
7
Grimsdottir’s panicked voice was immediately in his ear: “Sam, I—”
Fisher reached up and hit his transmit switch twice, then once, telling Lambert and Grimsdottir, Radio silence; wait for contact.
In or out, he commanded himself. If he got out now, they’d lock the dock down and his chance would be lost. If he stayed on mission, he’d be facing a security force on high alert, hunting for an intruder. It was an easy decision. This is what he did.
He quickly shut the scuttle, then pushed off the wall and finned downward, hands outstretched. When he touched the rough concrete of the dock’s bed, he rolled to the right and kept swimming. He had one chance and one chance only. The shed was divided by a main watercourse bracketed on both sides by working piers. If he could find a hiding place deep within the pier’s pilings, he might be able wait out the security sweep.
Above him, the water went suddenly from dark green to turquoise as the dock’s security lights came on, bathing the interior in bright light. He heard the muffled pounding of boots on the dock and voices shouting back and forth to one another.
His fingertips touched wood: a piling. He hooked his arm around it and pulled himself under the pier. The water went dark again. He switched on his task lights and was engulfed in hazy red light. He kept swimming, weaving his way through the pilings. Covered in mottled gray barnacles, they reminded him of elephant legs.
Somewhere behind him he heard multiple splashes. Divers in the water. The dock’s security team was well trained and moving fast. Keep going.