Patriot Strike

by Don Pendleton

  Always assuming that they managed to survive the next few days.

  There was a chance, Ridgway supposed, that the usurper in the White House would display more courage than Ridgway had counted on. The New Texas Republic would be starting small, in terms of military strength, but Ridgway thought his warning shot, together with the clear and present danger of a backup salvo fired from coast to coast, would keep the hounds at bay. If he was wrong...

  Well, it would be an interesting day or two, and even when the Green Berets or Navy SEALs, or whoever, took him down, he would have changed the world. When histories of the event were written, he would be remembered as the man who cleansed America with fire and gave those of its people who remained a chance to start from scratch, rebuilding on the model of the good old days.

  Why not?

  Who in his right mind would repeat the grievous errors of the past half century, when the results of ceding freedom to a mongrel welfare state were clearly recognized? How many nations got a do-over like that? Only a handful in recorded history, and none at all since World War II.

  A stranger to false modesty, Ridgway believed himself to be the savior of America, perhaps the world. Whether he won or lost the greatest gamble of his life, he’d never be forgotten.

  Hell, he’d be revered.

  George Roth was waiting for them at the plant, flown down the night before by Coetzee’s team, to get the final preparations underway. He’d done a great job on the rockets, building on his grandpa’s V-2 model to create a deadly no-frills arsenal. They had a dozen primed to fly, with twice as many in production, just in case.

  The rockets’ simple mechanism used the classic ethanol/water mixture for fuel, and liquid oxygen as an oxidizer. The combustion burner fired at a temperature of 4,500 to 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Guidance was achieved by four external rudders on the tail fins, and four internal graphite vanes at the motor’s exit, while two free gyroscopes provided lateral stabilization. At engine shutdown, sixty-five seconds after launching, a program motor controlled the pitch to a specified angle, dropping into a ballistic free-fall trajectory from fifty miles up.

  Then ka-boom!

  Ridgway was looking forward to that mushroom cloud with mixed emotions.

  Mostly, if he were honest, he was proud.

  Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building,

  Washington, D.C.

  AFTER HIS WAKEUP call from Bolan, Brognola dressed in haste and hurried to his office, dodging predawn traffic, cell phone grafted to his ear. His first call went to Stony Man Farm and put the whole team on alert. They would use every resource available to confirm the site of Ridgway’s would-be launchpad without crossing the line and possibly triggering a premature liftoff. That included satellite surveillance of the Lone Star plants in Texas and—a long-shot gamble—oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that might conceivably disguise a missile silo.

  Doubtful, but in this nightmare scenario, nothing could be ruled out.

  After arriving at his office, Hal called the NNSA’s headquarters on Independence Avenue. That was the only way to mobilize NEST, a far-flung network of some six hundred specialists with regular day jobs at various universities, research laboratories and government agencies. It would take time to roust them from bed and brief, gather and prepare them for what might turn out to be—God willing—just another false alarm.

  The NNSA’s nearest site to Houston was the Pantex Plant, America’s only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility, located northeast of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. That placed it almost six hundred miles north of Houston, while the nearest military installation was Truax Field, the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi. That was 184 miles from Lone Star Aerospace as the F-35 Lightning II multirole fighter flies, nine minutes from takeoff to payload delivery in the worst-case scenario.

  Worst case for whom?

  If Ridgway landed the first punch, its impact would depend on the warhead his rocket carried. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had killed an estimated eighty thousand people when it detonated, vaporizing buildings close to a mile from the blast’s hypocenter. Another two hundred thousand people had died over the next several years, from burns, injuries or radiation sickness. Citizens were still developing cancer directly linked to radiation exposure into the twenty-first century. Depending on the target Ridgway chose, the death toll from a nuclear strike could range from thousands into millions, with property damage off the Richter scale. And there was bound to be retaliation, though Hal doubted that the president would order nuclear reprisals against Texas. The Lone Star plants were bound to fall, with hundreds—maybe thousands— buried in the wreckage of a madman’s empire. As for the political and social shock waves, would they ever fade away, in a region where some people still believed they should have won the Civil War in 1865?

  It was too much for Hal to think about right now. The NNSA’s duty operator patched him through to the agency’s director, waking him as Bolan had woken Brognola. It was the director’s job to scramble NEST and have its experts standing by, ready to move whether the gambit Bolan planned was a success or tragic failure.

  Either way Brognola knew there would be blood.

  The burning questions now were how much and whose?

  Lone Star Aerospace Technology, Houston

  GEORGE ROTH STOOD beside the rocket he had come to think of as his child. It towered forty feet above him, fourteen tons of sleek and shining death, prepared to soar aloft at 3,500 miles per hour, then plummet toward impact with its chosen target. Roth still did not know where it would land, and truth be told, he didn’t care.

  Destruction was its own reward.

  The rocket would not launch from where it stood, its last preflight inspection underway. Rather, Roth had adapted the technique devised by his grandfather and others during the glorious days of the Reich, building a modern version of the venerable Meillerwagen. The souped-up trailer would transport the missile and erect it on a firing stand, but it would also serve double-duty as the supply tower to fuel up and prepare the rocket for liftoff. The carriage, with its towing arm, was forty-nine feet long and tipped the scales at nearly thirteen tons.

  The old V-rockets had been named Vergeltungswaffen in his native German—reprisal weapons. The label still applied today. Revenge had been a long time coming for the decadent American society that had destroyed the Reich, uprooting Herman Rothmann and his family from their homeland, but it had never been forgotten. Handed down from father to son and grandson, the goal of striking back would finally be realized.

  Today.

  Roth personally had no interest in Lamar Ridgway’s plans for a New Texas Republic. To Roth, no part of the United States was any better than the rest, though some of the initiatives adopted in Texas during recent years reminded him of stories he had heard about the 1920s and early 1930s. There were private armies on the march, a spirit of defiance in the air. Roth would personally be delighted if his rocket fell on Washington, but any target would be satisfactory.

  As long as he could watch America convulse in pain.

  “He’s here!” someone called out across the vast hangar. “Everyone in place!”

  Roth turned to watch Ridgway approaching, flanked by Malcolm Barnhart and their troupe of bodyguards. The little bantam rooster of a man had helped Roth realize his lifelong dream, but he could never think of Ridgway as a friend. At heart the Big Man was too crass, too addicted to his wealth, too all-around American to rank among Roth’s pantheon of heroes.

  Ridgway was approaching now, a broad smile on his face. He pumped Roth’s hand. “Are we ready?”

  “Yes, sir. Absolutely,” Roth assured him. “Relocation to the firing site and fueling should require no more than forty minutes.”

  “Excellent! We’ll have it airborne in the middle of my broadcast then.”

  “As planned, s
ir.”

  “And what about the MDA?”

  The Missile Defense Agency had been established in the early eighties, to create a layered defense against ballistic missiles. The agency was designed primarily to spot missiles launched at the United States from foreign countries as distant as Russia and China, intercepting them at one of four phases: boost, ascent, midcourse and terminal. Interception attempts during the boost and terminal phase were virtually futile—in the former case, the window of opportunity was usually too short, and in the latter, a detonation might still destroy the target. Optimal interception, theoretically, would occur while the incoming missile was coasting through space for twenty to thirty minutes, a lag time that a launching from within America itself eliminated.

  “Not a problem, sir,” Roth said with perfect confidence.

  “You’d stake your reputation on it?” Ridgway asked.

  “I’d stake my life, sir.”

  “Good,” Ridgway replied. “Because you’ve done exactly that.”

  Conroe, Texas

  AS THE CAR rolled south toward Houston, Adlene Granger realized that she had moved beyond raw anger to another plane. Her brother’s murder had inspired a quest for payback. Call it justice, but in her home state, justice frequently came from the barrel of a gun or sometimes through a needle in the arm. What it boiled down to was revenge, and who was better qualified to mete out vengeance than a Texas Ranger?

  Now coming to the end of it—and maybe to the fabled End of Days itself—she found that Jerod’s death had paled beside the sheer enormity of what his killers had planned for other people that she would never meet or get a chance to know. His murder left an ache inside her, and she doubted it would ever go away, but what was one man’s death, even a brother’s, when compared to tens of thousands?

  Nothing much.

  Besides, for all she knew, she had already killed his murderers. Or maybe Cooper had killed them for her. If they’d missed the men responsible, there was a good chance she’d meet them down the road, in Houston, when they crashed the madman’s party at Lone Star Aerospace. And on the other hand, if they escaped, she’d likely never know it.

  Did it matter?

  Nowhere near as much as stopping Ridgway’s crazy scheme to crown himself a king and take the country with him into ruin.

  Fiddling with her smartphone, she told Cooper, “I’ve got like sixty rental offices in Houston, just for Enterprise. They’re pretty good.”

  “Pick one on the west side,” he instructed. “If they haven’t got a van, we’ll call around.”

  “Okay. I’ve got one on the Southwest Freeway. I’m calling now.”

  She got a clerk who sounded like he could have been in junior high school, making her feel old, but he appeared to know his business. Yes, they had a van available. A Volkswagen Crafter with a sliding cargo door on the curb side and double doors in back, plus six-speed automatic transmission, blah, blah, blah.

  He quoted her a rate, and Granger put the van on hold in Matt Cooper’s name. Cooper handed her a credit card for the deposit, and she rattled off the numbers, paused and listened while the sales clerk read them back.

  “We’re good to go,” she said, when it was done.

  Bolan nodded.

  “You’ll be the primary. Better if I don’t show my driver’s license, just in case.”

  “You’re right,” Cooper said. “It could be flagged, by Ridgway’s people or the state.”

  It felt peculiar, thinking that she might now be a wanted fugitive. Were other Rangers hunting her, the old boy’s network feeling their prejudgment of a female Ranger had proven accurate?

  If so, she thought, to hell with them. They’d let this Ridgway business blossom right in front of them and never had an inkling that there might be something to investigate. It took her brother’s death to open that Pandora’s box, and even now she saw no indication that the DPS knew what was happening.

  Because you haven’t told them, said a small voice in her head, but Granger stifled it. Somebody should have seen this coming down the road. It wasn’t her responsibility to read a crazy old man’s mind, much less to save the world.

  Except, today, that job did fall to her.

  And she was praying that she wouldn’t drop the ball.

  Southwest Freeway, Houston

  THE VAN WAS PERFECT, eight feet wide, seven feet tall, with a 2.5-liter, straight-five turbodiesel engine and could carry more than six thousand pounds of cargo, far beyond Mack Bolan’s present needs. He only planned on packing in four hundred pounds or so, if that, and it would be dead weight.

  The clerk Granger had talked to had their contract waiting on arrival. Bolan passed his driver’s license over and signed for full insurance on the van. He didn’t plan to damage it, but that was unpredictable. If nothing else, there’d be forensic clean-up charges when the vehicle came back. The company would likely sell it afterward, rather than play disclosure games with renters who might think the van was permanently soiled—or even haunted—but that wasn’t Bolan’s problem. He was covered on the final tab, up front, and Stony Man was picking up the Visa bill.

  All that was left to do, before the madness started, was a drive-by to examine Lone Star Aerospace and spot exterior security. He couldn’t plan details after that point, although he had agreed with Granger on a strategy for entering the plant. Beyond that, he would have to trust in logic, namely that the warhead Ridgway planned to launch would not be armed until the final moments before liftoff, for the sake of those involved in launching it. Arming might only take the flipping of a switch, but no one in his right mind worked around a nuke when it was primed to blow.

  Of course the whole secession scheme was crazy to begin with. Could he count on Ridgway taking sane precautions now, at the eleventh hour? Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  It didn’t matter, in the last analysis. Bolan couldn’t let the rocket fly, regardless of the danger to himself and those around him when he made his final move. If there was going to be mass destruction, let it start with Lone Star’s team of rocket men.

  He didn’t know if Ridgway would be on the premises and didn’t care at this point. Heading off the launch trumped any other part of Bolan’s mission. And if that turned out to be his last achievement, he knew someone else would do the mopping up.

  As for the good people of Houston and its environs, if a nuke exploded in their backyard, many of them would die. One megaton, as Bolan understood it, would produce a crater two hundred feet deep and one thousand feet wide. Moving outward, no recognizable structures would survive within a radius of eleven hundred yards.

  At 1.7 miles from ground zero, a few of the strongest buildings might remain standing, but 98 percent of living things exposed to the blast would be killed. Near-absolute destruction would extend another mile, though mortality would drop down to 50 percent.

  At 4.7 miles, five percent of the population would die, but almost half the people in that area would be seriously injured. The damage would be moderate—with one in four people suffering wounds from flying debris—at 7.4 miles from the blast.

  The bottom line: he had to hope that Ridgway wasn’t quite as crazy as he seemed.

  Good luck with that.

  Chapter 13

  Lone Star Aerospace Technology

  “What are we looking for again?” Jan Basson asked.

  “The usual,” Theo Kastner replied. “Anything suspicious.” Basson grunted. “Do you reckon they can pull this off?”

  “Which part?” Basson replied.

  “Hell, any of it.”

  “What’s the difference? I’ve never had a job that paid this well before. Have you?”

  “Kuwait was close, but no. The trouble is, you have to live to spend it.”

  “Simon’s got that covered. If it starts to look l
ike it’s going belly-up, we’re out of here.”

  “Sure, I know the plan,” Basson said. “Sounds good in theory. But it isn’t like the damned Americans will just be sitting on their hands.”

  Basson himself was from South Africa. Kastner was German. Both had seen their share of mayhem under different flags, either supporting or opposing governments around the world.

  “You think about that kind of thing?” asked Kastner.

  “What, you don’t?”

  “There’s no point to it,” said Basson. “I never thought I’d live this long.”

  “That’s not the same as wishing you were dead.”

  “Relax. I didn’t sign up for a suicide. If Simon says we’re ready for a bugout, I believe him.”

  “Guess I’ve just never been the trusting sort.”

  “You have to try it sometime,” said Basson.

  “Let’s make it through today and see how that works out.”

  “Bogey at four o’clock,” Basson announced, cutting the conversation short.

  A white van was approaching from the west, dawdling along the curb at what amounted to a walking pace. A woman was driving, a man in the passenger’s seat with a road map open before him. That role reversal struck Basson as odd enough to rate a closer look. He moved to intercept the vehicle as it slowed further, coming to a full stop thirty feet in front of him. Kastner was close behind, both men with their jackets open, granting rapid access to the MP5K submachine guns slung in fast-draw shoulder rigs.

  “You want to call this in?” asked Kastner.

  Basson thought about it, then said, “Better not to worry them with every little thing. Simon will think we’re just a pair of hondenaaiers.”

  “Can’t say that I like the sound of that.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Basson told him, smiling as he moved in closer to the van.

  “So tell me what it means,” said Kastner.

  “When you’re older. Cover me.”

  “You’re covered.”

  He could see the right-hand window lowering, the man behind the street map turning toward him with a vaguely troubled look. The woman in the driver’s seat—his wife, perhaps?—looked stern, as if she had been raising hell over his faulty navigation.