by Tom Clancy
“All the people who know what’s been happening. You’d want to keep that number low for security reasons, wouldn’t you—so, you think they’re going down there for choir practice?”
“What?” Popov asked.
“They need to find and learn a single story to tell the FBI when the interrogations begin,” Foley explained. “So, they all need to learn the same hymn, and learn to sing it the same way every time.”
“What would you do in their place, Ed?” Rainbow Six asked reasonably.
Foley nodded. “Yeah, that’s about it. Okay, what should we do?”
Clark looked the DCI straight in the eye. “Pay them a little visit, maybe?”
“Who authorizes that?” the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
“I still draw my paychecks from this agency. I report to you, Ed, remember?”
“Christ, John.”
“Do I have your permission to get my people together at a suitable staging point?”
“Where?”
“Fort Bragg, I suppose,” Clark proposed. Foley had to yield to the logic of the moment.
“Permission granted.” And with that Clark walked down the narrow office to a table with a secure phone to call Hereford.
Alistair Stanley had bounced back well from his wounds, enough so that he could just about manage a full day in his office without collapsing with exhaustion. Clark’s trip to the States had left him in charge of a crippled Rainbow force, and he was facing problems now that Clark had not yet addressed, like replacements for the two dead troopers. Morale was brittle at the moment. There were still two missing people with whom the survivors had worked intimately, and that was never an easy thing for men to bear, though every morning they were out on the athletic field doing their daily routine, and every afternoon they fired their weapons to stay current and ready for a possible call-up. This was regarded as unlikely, but, then, none of the missions that Rainbow had carried out had been, in retrospect, very likely. His secure phone started chirping, and Stanley reached to answer it.
“Yes, this is Alistair Stanley.”
“Hi, Al, this is John. I’m in Langley now.”
“What the bloody hell’s been happening, John? Chavez and his people have fallen off the earth, and—”
“Ding and his people are halfway between Hawaii and California now, Al. They arrested a major conspirator in Sydney.”
“Very well, what the devil’s been going on?”
“You sitting down, Al?”
“Yes, John, of course I am, and—”
“Listen up. I’ll give you the short version,” Clark commanded, and proceeded to do that for the next ten minutes.
“Bloody hell,” Stanley said when his boss stopped talking. “You’re sure of this?”
“Damned sure, Al. We are now tracking the conspirators in four aircraft. They seem to be heading for central Brazil. Okay, I need you to get all the people together and fly them to Fort Bragg—Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina—with all their gear. Everything, Al. We may be taking a trip down to the jungle to . . . to, uh, deal decisively with these people.”
“Understood. I’ll try to get things organized here. Maximum speed?”
“That is correct. Tell British Airways we need an airplane,” Clark went on.
“Very well, John. Let me get moving here.”
In Langley, Clark wondered what would happen next, but before he could decide that he needed to get all of his assets in place. Okay, Alistair would try to get British Airways to release a spare, reserve aircraft to his people for a direct flight to Pope, and from there—from there he’d have to think some more. And he’d have to get there, too, to Special Operations Command with Colonel Little Willie Byron.
“Target One is descending,” a control officer reported over the aircraft’s intercom. The senior controller looked up from the book he was reading, activated his scope, and confirmed the information. He was breaking international law at the moment. Eagle Two-Niner hadn’t gotten permission to overfly Brazil, but the air-traffic-control radar systems down there read his transponder signal as a civilian air-cargo flight—the usual ruse—and nobody had challenged them yet. Confirming that information, he got on his satellite radio to report this information to NORAD and, though he didn’t know it, on to CIA. Five minutes later, Target Two started doing the same. Also both aircraft were slowing, allowing Eagle Two-Niner to catch up somewhat. The senior controller told the flight crew to continue on this heading and speed, inquired about fuel state, and learned that they had another eight hours of flight time, more than enough to return to their home at Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City.
In England, the British Airways card was played, and the airline, after ten minutes of checking, assigned Rainbow a 737-700 airliner, which would await their pleasure at Luton, a small commercial airport north of London. They’d have to go there by truck, and those were whistled up from the British army’s transport company at Hereford.
It looked like a green sea, John Brightling thought, the top layer of the triple-canopy jungle. In the setting sun, he could see the silvery paths of rivers, but almost nothing of the ground itself. This was the richest ecosystem on the planet, and one that he’d never studied in detail—well, Brightling thought, now he’d be able to, for the next year or so. Project Alternate was a robust and comfortable facility with a maintenance staff of six people, its own power supply, satellite communications, and ample food. He wondered which of the people on the four aircraft might be good cooks. There would be a division of labor here, as at every other Project activity, with himself, of course, as the leader.
At Binghamton, New York, the maintenance staff was loading a bunch of biohazard-marked containers into the incinerator. It was sure a big furnace, one of the men thought—big enough to cremate a couple of bodies at the same time—and, judging by the thickness of the insulation, a damned hot one. He pulled down the three-inch-thick door, locked it in place, and punched the ignition button. He could hear the gas jetting it and lighting off from the sparkler-things inside, followed by the usual voosh. There was nothing unusual about this. Horizon Corporation was always disposing of biological material of one sort or another. Maybe it was live AIDS virus, he thought. The company did a lot of work in that area, he’d read. But for the moment he looked at the papers on his clipboard. Three sheets of paper from the special order that had been faxed in from Kansas, and every line was checked off. All the containers specified were now ashes. Hell, this incinerator even destroyed the metal lids. And up into the sky went the only physical evidence of the Project. The maintenance worker didn’t know that. To him container G7-89-98-00A was just a plastic container. He didn’t even know that there was a word such as Shiva. As required, he went to his desktop computer—everyone here had one—and typed in that he’d eliminated the items on the work order. This information went into Horizon Corporation’s internal network, and, though he didn’t know it, popped onto a screen in Kansas. There were special instructions with that, and the technician lifted his phone to relay the information to another worker, who relayed it in turn to the phone number identified on the electronically posted notice.
“Okay, thank you,” Bill Henriksen replied upon hearing the information. He replaced the cabin phone and made his way forward to the Brightlings.
“Okay, guys, that was Binghamton. All the Shiva stuff, all the vaccines, everything’s been burned up. There is now no real physical evidence that the Project ever existed.”
“We’re supposed to be happy about that?” Carol demanded crossly, looking out her window at the approaching ground.
“No, but I hope you’ll be happier than you’d be if you were facing an indictment for conspiracy to commit murder, Doctor.”
“He’s right, Carol,” John said, sadness in his voice. So close. So damned close. Well, he consoled himself, he still had resources, and he still had a core of good people, and this setback didn’t mean that he’d have to give up his ideals, did it? N
ot hardly, the chairman of Horizon told himself. Below, under the green sea into which they were descending, was a great diversity of life—he’d justified building Project Alternate to his board for that very reason, to find new chemical compounds in the trees and plants that grew only here—maybe a cure for cancer, who could say? He heard the flaps lower, and soon thereafter, the landing gear went down. Another three minutes, and they thumped down on the road-runway constructed along with the lab and residential buildings. The aircraft’s thrust-reversers engaged, and it slowed to a gradual stop.
“Okay, Target One is down on the ground.” The controller read off the exact position, then adjusted his screen’s picture. There were buildings there, too? Well, okay, and he told the computer to calculate their exact position, which information was immediately relayed to Cheyenne Mountain.
“Thank you.” Foley wrote the information down on a pad. “John, I have exact lat and longe for where they are. I’ll task a satellite to get pictures for us. Should have that in, oh, two or three hours, depending on weather there.”
“So fast?” Popov asked, looking out the seventh-floor windows at the VIP parking lot.
“It’s just a computer command,” Clark explained. “And the satellites are always up there.” Actually, three hours struck him as a long time to wait. The birds must have been in the wrong places for convenience.
Rainbow lifted off the runway at Luton well after midnight, British time, looping around to the right over the automobile-assembly plant located just off the airport grounds and heading west for America. British Airways had assigned three flight attendants to the flight, and they kept the troopers fed and supplied with drink, which all the soldiers accepted before they settled down as best they could to sleep most of the way across. They had no idea why they were going to America. Stanley hadn’t briefed them in on anything yet, though they wondered why they were packing all of their tactical gear.
Skies were blessedly clear over the jungles of central Brazil. The first KH-11D went over at nine-thirty in the night, local time. Its infrared cameras took a total of three hundred twenty frames, plus ninety-seven more in the visible spectrum. These images were immediately cross-loaded to a communications satellite, and from there beamed down to the antenna farm at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, near Washington. From there they went by landline to the National Reconnaissance Office building near Dulles Airport, and from there via another fiber-optic line to CIA headquarters.
“This looks pretty vanilla,” the senior duty photoanalyst told them in Foley’s office. “Buildings here, here, here, and this one here. Four airplanes on the ground, look like Gulfstream Vs—that one’s got a longer wing. Private airfield, it’s got lights but no ILS gear. I expect the fuel tanks are here. Power plant here. Probably a diesel generator system, by the look of this exhaust plume. This building looks residential from the window-light pattern. Somebody build a nature resort we’re interested in?” the analyst asked.
“Something like that,” Clark confirmed. “What else?”
“Nothing much for a ninety-mile radius. This here used to be a rubber-tree plantation, I’d say, but the buildings are not warmed up, and so I’d have to say it’s inactive. Not much in the way of civilization. Fires down this way”—he pointed—“campfires, maybe from indigenous people, Indian tribes or such-like. That’s one lonely place, sir. Must have been a real pain in the ass to build this place, isolated as it is.”
“Okay, send us the Lacrosse images, too, and when we get good visual-light images, I want to see those, too,” Foley said.
“We’ll have a direct-overhead pass on another bird at about zero-seven-twenty Lima,” he said, meaning local time. “Weather forecast looks okay. Ought to get good frames from that pass.”
“How wide is this runway?” Clark asked.
“Oh, looks like seven thousand feet long by three hundred or so wide, standard width, and they’ve cut the trees down another hundred yards—meters, probably, on both sides. So, you could get a fair-sized airplane in there if the concrete’s thick enough. There’s a dock here on the river, it’s the Río Negro, actually, not the Amazon itself, but no boats. I guess that’s left over from the construction process.”
“I don’t see any telephone or power lines,” Clark said next, looking closely at the photo.
“No, sir, there ain’t none. I guess they depend on satellite and radio comms from this antenna farm.” He paused. “Anything else you need?”
“No, and thanks,” Clark told the technician.
“Yes, sir, you bet.” The analyst walked out to take the elevator for his basement office.
“Learn anything?” Foley asked. He himself knew nothing about running around in jungles, but he knew that Clark did.
“Well, we know where they are, and we know about how many of ’em there are.”
“What are you planning, John?”
“I’m not sure yet, Ed” was the honest reply. Clark wasn’t planning much, but he was starting to think.
The C-17 thumped down rather hard at Travis Air Force Base in California. Chavez and his companions were rather seriously disoriented by all the travel, but the walk outside the aircraft was, at least, in pleasantly cool air. Chavez pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed Hereford, then learned that John was in Langley. He had to dredge that number up from his memory, but remembered it after twenty seconds or so, and dialed.
“Director’s office.”
“This is Domingo Chavez calling for John Clark.”
“Hold, please,” Foley’s receptionist replied.
“Where are you now, Ding?” John asked, when he got on the line.
“Travis Air Force base, north of ’Frisco. Now where the hell are we supposed to go?”
“There should be an Air Force VC-20 waiting for you at the DV terminal.”
“Okay, I’ll get over that way. We don’t have any of our gear with us, John. We left Australia in a hurry.”
“I’ll have somebody take care of that. You get the hell back to D.C., okay?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. C,” Ding acknowledged.
“Your guest, what’s his name—Gearing?”
“That’s right. Noonan sat with him most of the way. He sang like a fuckin’ canary, John. This thing they planned to do, I mean if it’s real—Jesuchristo, jefe.”
“I know, Ding. They’ve bugged out, by the way.”
“Where to, do we know?”
“Brazil. We know exactly where they are. I have Al bringing the team across to Fort Bragg. You get to Andrews, and we’ll get organized.”
“Roge-o, John. Let me go find my airplane. Out.” Chavez killed the phone and waved for a blue USAF van that took them to the Distinguished Visitors’ lounge, where they found yet another flight crew waiting for them. Soon thereafter, they boarded the VC-20, the Air Force version of the Gulfstream business jet, and aboard they found out what time it was from the food that the sergeant served them. Breakfast. It had to be early morning, Chavez decided. Then he asked the sergeant for the correct time and reset his watch.
CHAPTER 39
HARMONY
It struck Noonan as terribly odd that he was traveling with a confessed attempted-mass-murderer in an aircraft without the man’s being in handcuffs or a straitjacket or some sort of restraint. But, as a practical matter, what was he going to do, and where was he going to go? It might be possible to open the door and jump out, but Gearing didn’t strike the FBI agent as a suicide risk, and Noonan was damned sure he wasn’t going to hijack this aircraft to Cuba. And so Tim Noonan just kept an eye on the prisoner, while considering that he’d arrested the mutt on another continent, in a different time zone and hemisphere, and on the far side of the International Dateline. He’d been in on the Fuad Yunis takedown in the Eastern Mediterranean ten or eleven years before, but he figured this might be the FBI’s all-time distance record for arresting a subject and bringing the mutt home. Close enough to twelve thousand miles. Damn. The price had been the air travel, which had
his body thoroughly wrecked and crying out for exercise. He changed the time setting on his watch, then wondered if the day was the same—but, he decided, while you could ask the USAF sergeant flight attendant for the time, you’d look like a total fucking idiot to have to ask the date. Maybe he’d get it from a copy of USA Today back in the States, Noonan thought, pushing his seat back and locking his eyes on the back of Wil Gearing’s head. Then he realized: He’d have to turn his prisoner in when they got to Washington, but to whom, and on what charge?
“Okay,” Clark said. “They get into Andrews in two hours, and then we’ll take a puddle-jumper to Pope and figure out what to do.”
“You’ve got a plan already, John,” Foley observed. He’d known Clark long enough to recognize that look in his eyes.
“Ed, is this my case to run or isn’t it?” he asked the DCI.
“Within reason, John. Let’s try not to start a nuclear war or anything, shall we?”
“Ed, can this ever come to trial? What if Brightling ordered the destruction of all the evidence? It’s not hard to do, is it? Hell, what are we talking about? A few buckets of bio-gunk and some computer records. There’re commercial programs that destroy files thoroughly enough that you can’t recover them ever, right?”
“True, but somebody might have printed stuff up, and a good search—”
“And then what do we have? A global panic when people realize what a bio-tech company can do if it wants. What good will that do?”
“Toss in a senior presidential advisor who violated security. Jesus, that would not be very helpful for Jack, would it?” Foley paused. “But we can’t murder these people, John! They’re U.S. citizens with rights, remember?”
