Bio-Strike (2000)
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
ONE - VARIOUS LOCALES OCTOBER 7, 2001
TWO - LA PAZ, BOLIVIA OCTOBER 15, 2001
THREE - MONTEREY BAY, CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 28, 2001
FOUR - BAJA PENINSULA, MEXICO OCTOBER 31, 2001
FIVE - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 2, 2001
SIX - SAN JOSE/SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 4, 2001
SEVEN - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 4, 2001
EIGHT - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 6, 2001
NINE - NATION CODE NAME: CAPE GREEN NOVEMBER 6, 2001
TEN - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 6, 2000
ELEVEN - SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 8, 2001
TWELVE - SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 11, 2001
THIRTEEN - CALIFORNIA/VIRGINIA NOVEMBER 13, 2001
FOURTEEN - SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 14, 2001
FIFTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 14, 2001
SIXTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 15, 2001
SEVENTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 15, 2001
EIGHTEEN - CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 16, 2001
NINETEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 16, 2001
TWENTY - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 16, 2001
TWENTY-ONE - CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 16, 2001
TWENTY-TWO - SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 16, 2001
TWENTY-THREE - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 17, 2001
TWENTY-FOUR - NORTHERN ONTARIO, CANADA NOVEMBER 17, 2001
TWENTY-FIVE - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 18, 2001
TWENTY-SIX - VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 23, 2001
EPILOGUE
THE BESTSELLING NOVELS OF
TOM CLANCY
RAINBOW SIX
John Clark is used to doing the CIA’s dirty work. Now he’s taking on the world....
“ACTION-PACKED.”
—The New York Times Book Review
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
The most devastating terrorist act in history leaves Jack Ryan as president of the United States....
“UNDOUBTEDLY CLANCY’S BEST YET.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DEBT OF HONOR
It begins with the murder of an American woman in the backstreets of Tokyo. It ends in war....
“A SHOCKER CLIMAX SO PLAUSIBLE YOU’LL WONDER WHY IT HASN’T YET HAPPENED.”
—Entertainment Weekly
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER
The smash bestseller that launched Clancy’s career—the incredible search for a Soviet defector and the nuclear submarine he commands ...
“BREATHLESSLY EXCITING.”
—The Washington Post
RED STORM RISING
The ultimate scenario for World War III—the final battle for global control...
“THE ULTIMATE WAR GAME ... BRILLIANT.”
-Newsweek
PATRIOT GAMES
CIA analyst Jack Ryan stops an assassination—and incurs the wrath of Irish terrorists....
“A HIGH PITCH OF EXCITEMENT.”
—The Wall Street Journal
THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN
The superpowers race for the ultimate Star Wars missile defense system....
“CARDINAL EXCITES, ILLUMINATES ... A REAL
PAGE-TURNER.” —Los Angeles Daily News
CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
The killing of three U.S. officials in Colombia ignites the American government’s explosive, and top secret, response....
“A CRACKLING GOOD YARN.”
—The Washington Post
THE SUM OF ALL FEARS
The disappearance of an Israeli nuclear weapon threatens the balance of power in the Middle East—and around the world....
“CLANCY AT HIS BEST ... NOT TO BE MISSED.”
—The Dallas Morning News
WITHOUT REMORSE
The Clancy epic that fans have been waiting for. His code name is Mr. Clark. And his work for the CIA is brilliant, cold-blooded, and efficient... but who is he really?
“HIGHLY ENTERTAINING.”—The Wall Street Journal
NOVELS BY TOM CLANCY
The Hunt for Red October
Red Storm Rising
Patriot Games
The Cardinal of the Kremlin
Clear and Present Danger
The Sum of All Fears
Without Remorse
Debt of Honor
Executive Orders
Rainbow Six
The Bear and the Dragon
Red Rabbit
The Teeth of the Tiger
SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare
NONFICTION
Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship
Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment
Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing
Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit
Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force
Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier
Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces
Into the Storm: A Study in Command
(written with General Fred Franks, Jr., Ret.)
Every Man a Tiger
(written with General Charles Horner, Ret.)
Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces
(written with General Carl Stiner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)
CREATED BY TOM CLANCY
Splinter Cell
CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Games of State
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Acts of War
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Balance of Power
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: State of Siege
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Divide and Conquer
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Line of Control
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mission of Honor
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Sea of Fire
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Call to Treason
Tom Clancy’s Net Force
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Hidden Agendas
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Night Moves
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Breaking Point
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Point of Impact
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: CyberNation
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: State of War
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Changing of the Guard
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Springboard
CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND MARTIN GREENBERG
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Politika
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: ruthless.com
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Shadow Watch
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Bio-Strike
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cold War
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cutting Edge
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Zero Hour
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Wild Card
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: BIO-STRIKE
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
RSE Holdings, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / November 2000
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by RSE Holdings, Inc.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form<
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eISBN : 978-1-101-00259-9
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Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Marc Cerasini, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq.; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan; and Doug Littlejohns, Kevin Perry, the rest of the Bio-Strike team, and the other fine folks at Red Storm Entertainment and Holistic Design. As always, I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.
—Tom Clancy
ONE
VARIOUS LOCALES OCTOBER 7, 2001
AMERICAN CITIES RUN BY THE CLOCK. THIS IS TRUEST of the largest and busiest, where the minute hand impels people through their routines without room for pause. The sleep-demolishing clatter of a five A.M. trash pickup, a breakneck dash to the subway, back-to-back conferences noted in a desk planner, business luncheons, happy hours, and more commuter sprints—these are distance markers on the constricted urban fast track, a daily marathon of appointments and schedules where it is only an apparent contradiction to say even the unpredictable occurs at predictable times.
It was largely because of its precise adherence to schedule, its tidal inflow and outflow of humanity, that the New York Stock Exchange was chosen to be ground zero for the northeastern seaboard of the United States, the epicenter of an explosion that would be neither heard nor felt by the thousands of souls it overtook, yet was potentially more catastrophic than a full-scale nuclear assault.
Inconspicuous as the weapon he was carrying, the man in the dark blue suit walked past the statue of George Washington in Federal Plaza to the impressive Greek Revival building on Wall Street amid a swarm of traders and clerks eager to make the opening bell. A tobacco-leather briefcase in his right hand, he climbed the broad outer stairs, passed under the stone pediment with its sculpted gods of finance and invention, and strode through the entrance onto the main trading floor. Once inside, he continued moving with the flood of conservatively dressed men and women as they pushed toward the brokerage booths, trading posts, and banks of phone and video monitors that linked the Exchange to the national and foreign market networks.
Scanning the room, he discovered an unoccupied phone stall, jostled toward it, placed his briefcase on the floor near his feet, and lifted the receiver.
His hand on the hook, he randomly keyed in a number and pretended to make a call.
He would stand there waiting until the time was right.
A few moments later, the bell rang out from the platform, and the nation’s most powerful engine of commerce jolted into high gear. The buzz of voices around him became an enthusiastic clamor, the loud outcries of stock auctioneers carrying up to the vaulted ceiling, tantalizing their bidders like bright flashes of gold and precious gems.
He felt sure that no one was paying attention to him. He was invisible in his conformity, to all eyes just another securities professional touching base with his office as the early quotes hit the board.
The silent phone cradled between his chin and shoulder, he leaned down and pushed a catch beside one of the briefcase’s combination locks. The latch did not snap open. Nor had that been his intent.
Still bent over the case, he heard a low sound issue from its side panel.
Hissssss.
Like a venomous snake.
The device was patterned after the modified attaché cases once found by authorities in the compound of Japanese Aum Shinrikyo terrorists, the same extremist cult responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway attack that killed a dozen riders and left over 5,000 people grievously injured from exposure to sarin nerve gas. Like the Aum’s delivery system, it had been contrived from a small aerosol canister, a battery-operated handheld fan, and a nozzle running to a camouflaged vent in the shell of the briefcase. His single improvement to their original design was the lock-catch triggering mechanism, which eliminated any need to raise the lid and reduced his chances of drawing unwanted attention.
Lifting his case, the man in the dark blue suit hung up the receiver and stepped back into the crowd. Someone immediately shouldered past to take his place at the phone, scarcely noticing him. Good, he thought. In the general commotion, the expulsion of aerosol couldn’t be heard. He had only to wind his way around the room a bit, insuring the agent was spread throughout, and his job here would be finished. His targets would do the rest with their scrambling between appointments, their five-o’ clock cocktail gatherings, their close-packed bodies on homebound trains and buses. Mingling with coworkers, casual acquaintances, and friends, kissing their wives and hugging their children, going around and around in relentless, cyclical patterns of high-speed movement, they would very effectively do the rest.
Soon he left the Exchange and turned onto Broad Street, the canister in his briefcase emptied of its unseen contents. In his mind, he could still hear the noise from the vents: hissssss.
The memory raised the hairs at the back of his neck. He’d been guaranteed there was nothing to worry about, and the assignment had paid handsomely enough to help compensate for any lingering anxiety. Still, he was glad to be outside the building, and he welcomed even the thick, unseasonably warm air of Manhattan in fall ... knowing he hadn’t really left anything behind. Not anything that couldn’t follow him.
If what he had released wasn’t already out there on the street, it would be.
Soon enough, it would be everywhere.
The Air Tractor AT-802 turboprop is a mainstay of the agricultural aviation industry and a common sight in the sky above central Florida, a region that accounts for almost 70 percent of the nation’s total citrus production. Aboard the plane is an 800-gallon hopper that may contain any of a wide range of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Pumps beneath the fuselage drive the chemical from the hopper into wing-mounted booms equipped with either special nozzles, in the case of liquids, or spreaders, in the case of solids, for spraying the vast groves of orange, grapefruit, lemon, and lime trees.
On this particular morning, an AT-802 launched from a grass airstrip west of Clermont for a spray run with something worlds removed from the products normally used by ag pilots. To prevent its degradation in storage and transport, the material had been lyophilized, or freeze-dried, into an ultrafine, whitish powder that resembled confectioners’ sugar to the naked eye. The particles were then embedded in tiny granular spheres composed of a biodegradable organic compound, increasing their stability and ensuring a controlled and uniform rate of release. Perfectly smooth and free-flowing, the microcapsules rolled virtually without friction and would not acquire electrostatic charges that might make them cling to objects on which they alighted, enabling secondary dissemination of the agent in breezes kicked up by weather, the wings of birds, or the tires of a Mack semi whipping down the interstate.
Its manufacturer had wanted only the best and obtained it at the cost of millions, knowing his clients would find the product irresistible, and confident of an impressive return on his investment.
The crop duster banked to the southwest now, maintaining a low altitude, flying across the wind. At his controls, its pilot could see the trees spread out beneath him, row after row seaming the fields to the extreme limit of his vision, their heavy green crowns jeweled with orange and yellow fruit that would soon be harvested, packaged, and shipped from coast to coa
st. On his panel were state-of-the-art GPS and GIS displays mapping the acreage to be covered in exact coordinates, displaying a stream of real-time data about outside environmental conditions, monitoring every aspect of his dispersal unit’s operation. According to the instruments, a meteorological inversion had kept a band of cool air close to the ground today, ideal weather because it would prevent the powder from drifting off target with warmer, rising air currents.
He buzzed over the groves, once, twice, and again, a vaporous swath trailing from his wings with each deliberate pass. The aerosol hung in the blue, billowed in the blue, marked the blue with wide, white, parallel stripes that gradually scattered and bled into a light, milky haze.
Then—gently, softly—it settled to earth.
A Boeing 747 wide-bodied jumbo jet can carry over 400 passengers on an international trip, seating as many as 10 abreast, far exceeding the capacity of other commercial airliners. For Steve Whitford this had been so much a mixed blessing that he found himself happily awaiting his layover as his flight taxied to a halt in Sydney.
While he had gotten the last available booking on that flight at the very last possible minute—and supposed he should have been too thankful for the seat to bemoan the absence of leg and elbow room—Steve had little doubt the plane would have burst open like an overstuffed tube of Pillsbury cookie dough had they tried squeezing even a single additional body aboard. At a spindly six feet four—with most of that beanpole height stacked from hip to shin—he was willing to admit his opinion might be a tad prejudiced, but he would have argued its worthiness, nonetheless. Higher than himself can no man think, hadn’t some famous philosopher said that once upon a time?