by AJ Tata
Matt sat next to Rampert inside the enclosed communications pod.
“Our operator in Canada has missed two reporting windows,” Rampert said. “Our standard operating procedure for that contingency is to do an emergency extraction. We lost the beacon on him about four hours ago, but we believe we know where he is. Because I’ve got two wounded operators and there is a sense of urgency to this mission, I am jumping in with the two men you see out there preparing. That gives me three. We need a fourth.”
Rampert let the invitation hang in the air.
“Who is the operator?” Matt asked, Meredith’s conversation fresh in his mind.
“Major Boudreaux,” Rampert said.
“You’re lying.”
His steel gray eyes locked onto Matt’s.
“You jumping or not? We don’t have much time. It will just be getting dark. We climb to twenty thousand feet over Canadian airspace along the Saint Lawrence River, jump into the breeze, and glide onto the Lake Moncrief landing zone. We find our operator, kill Ballantine, and get extracted by Pave Low helicopter. Afterward, we tell the Canucks what we did. Maybe.”
Matt thought for a moment. What did he have to lose? It had been a while since he had done an oxygen-assisted freefall, but it was like riding a bike. Worst that could happen was that he would burn a smoking hole in the Canadian countryside and never be heard from again. Better than dodging baseballs in my backyard, Matt thought.
Best that could happen would be that they rescue Boudreaux, or whoever he was, and get Ballantine. It seemed like a pretty good reward for the risk. Already he had been shot at twice, once by a farmer’s daughter and once by a terrorist. His fresh wound made the wounds from the Philippines a year ago seem like a century removed. There was still pain in his ribcage and a scar across his forearm, but somehow being able to do something, to go after someone, was helping, both psychologically and physically.
Matt had wallowed in his own self pity for too long. He had mourned Zachary’s death and his inability to prevent his loss, despite his proximity at the time. He had convinced himself that he had become a liability to Zachary and had distracted him from his own mission, which ultimately led to his brother’s demise.
Irrational?
But now Matt was being given a chance to avenge the loss of his brother. While he knew that he had better odds of getting struck by lightning during a shark attack while celebrating a Power Ball lottery win than of finding his brother in some Canadian fishing hole used as a command post by terrorists, he had to try. What if?
“Okay, I’m in.”
CHAPTER 28
Aboard U.S. Air Force MC-130 Special Operations Command Center
Matt’s stomach crawled into his throat at the nearly forgotten feeling of an MC-130 aircraft climbing to altitude faster than it was designed to. Matt leaned back into the red mesh webbing and shut his eyes for a brief moment, visualizing the pilots, frustrated fighter jocks, discussing whether or not to do a barrel roll or a corkscrew. The smell of jet fuel filled his nostrils, and it began to work its magical effect of making him drowsy.
“You say you know this guy?” Rampert interrupted. He was pointing at Dr. Werthstein. Matt rubbed his face and then looked at him. He considered that the doctor could be a body double for Albert Einstein in a biopic.
“No. Don’t know him, but know of him,” Matt said.
“Well, we can’t get jack shit out of him. Why don’t you try?” Rampert said. “But make it quick. You need to suit up.”
“Roger.”
Matt slid next to Werthstein, grabbed a K-bar knife from a sheath hanging in the communications pod, and cut Werthstein’s flex-cuffs free.
“Thank you,” the old man whispered, eyes looking down at the floor and hands rubbing his bruised wrists.
“Why didn’t you come with us when we tried to get you out of there?” Matt asked.
“They would have killed my family. There is no escaping them.”
“No escaping who?”
“What have I done? Oh, what have I done?” the doctor whispered, looking away.
“That’s what we’re trying to establish here. What have you done?”
“My family . . . is there any way to protect my family?” The old man was nearly in tears and for the first time made eye contact with Matt.
“Where is your family?”
“They are being held captive in France. We tried telling the French government these people were after me, but because we are Americans they told us to go to hell.”
“Who is holding them captive, and where are they?” When the man answered, Matt wrote down the information and handed it to Rampert. “See if you can get some of your buddies to go to this address and secure a woman and three children, ages nine to fifteen.”
Rampert looked at Matt, then at the professor. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
Matt walked back to Werthstein, who had witnessed the exchange between Matt and Rampert.
“Now, quid pro quo,” Matt said.
“I know, I know. Lord, help me.”
“Start with the bees. They communicate, right?”
“Yes, the bees. Very good. The bees communicate throughout the swarm by pheromones. Ants do much the same thing. When bees are out looking for nectar, one scout finds it and he can send pheromone signals back to the swarm, allowing all the drones to mass on that one area. Ants are similar except, of course, they don’t fly. They scavenge for food, find what they are looking for, and then mark the trail back and forth between the colony and target area so that all the other ants can simply follow the pheromone trail.”
Matt saw Rampert in the background, talking on a telephone, nodding his head. Matt felt the MC-130 shoot upward again, leaving his stomach on the floor.
“Okay, now tell me how that is a bad thing.” Matt asked.
“I am the only one who has been able to replicate this activity through nanotechnology, using microscopic chipsets and advanced computing power that isn’t even in the experimentation phase at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore. I have written the program that allows entities to communicate by way of dropping ‘digital pheromones.’”
“And who has this technology now?”
“Well, me, and those terrorists that kidnapped my family,” Werthstein spat.
“Okay, and what have the terrorists done with this technology?”
Werthstein hesitated. Matt could see the strain on his face. Faced with the impossible moral dilemma of watching madmen execute your family or handing over secret and lethal technology to your nation’s enemies, no man could predict how he would react until faced with the problem set. This man, Matt believed, was no different. Despite the crushing reality of his situation, he suffered under an incredible burden of guilt. He was given the worst of all choices: a lose-lose situation.
“They made me apply it to a fleet of UAVs. Now they can communicate with one another, flying in the sky for days. How do you think they tracked you?”
“That’s exactly what I thought, but how did the UAVs know to track me, Matt Garrett?” Matt said.
“I accessed your files, your medical records from Walter Reed. Really not very secure at all. I uploaded your physical characteristics and some photos of you into the UAV database. The microprocessor on the queen recalculated your dimensions into a data packet it could transmit to the drones. The drones then took turns following you in the sky, all from different directions, all for short duration so as to avoid detection. It’s all biometrics. Really quite simple to do today.”
Matt stared at Werthstein, speechless.
“This was a passive activity though, Mr. Garrett. I believe what they have in mind is not passive.”
“Go on,” Matt said. “Tell me, how many UAVs do they have? What kind are they?”
“They never gave me the number. They just flew me to a couple of different places—blindfolded, of course—and made me input the code into the ground control stations, the queens. Any one queen can communica
te and direct a limitless number of UAVs. I loaded four machines, but I’m not certain if they were all ground control stations. They wouldn’t tell me what type of UAVs they are, but my belief is that they are Predators. They may have also exported the data over the web, but I can’t be sure.”
“Why do you think they are Predators?” It was all coming together now. Iraq, or some rogue terrorist supporter, would not have the satellite or bandwidth capability to put a bunch of Predators in the sky and let them roam around the countryside. However, when he thought about countries like China and North Korea, he could visualize the satellite capability and a cartel of sorts with the capacity to do precisely what Dr. Werthstein feared.
“I believe they are Predators because they had to give me the weight, wing span, and so forth so that I could write the code properly.”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Matt asked.
“The worst that could happen?” Werthstein paused. “Thirty, forty Predators roaming the skies, all programmed with one target for redundancy or many programmed with several targets. Once one Predator sees its target, it will communicate instantly to the rest of the swarm, just like the bees, and move to the target area. Only, these Predators will be armed, and I believe they will be armed with nuclear weapons.”
“Ten minutes, Garrett. Got to get ready,” Rampert shouted.
Matt sat back, stunned, staring at Werthstein.
“Normal air defenses will expend all of their ammunition, destroying some of the Predators, yes, but because they can swarm, the redundancy will defeat even the best defenses.”
“What are their targets?” Matt asked.
“They made me program about fifty different targets: people, places, ground transportation hubs such as ports, as well as nuclear power plants and electrical switching grids. There are many others. They made me put the targets into a central database. Now all they have to do is use a computer mouse to click and drag a specific target to a UAV icon on the computer screen and the queen will automatically program that specific UAV for that specific target. Even if the target is moving, like a convoy, the drones can follow, mass, and destroy the target.”
“Using the digital pheromones?”
“Precisely. That’s how they followed you.”
“How do you stop it? Kill the queen? Destroy the colony?”
“If you kill the queen, the drones can act independently, sending the digital pheromones to one another. They have a survival instinct. If you don’t kill the queen, she programs the drones to attack one, some, or all of the fifty targets I loaded.”
“Let’s go!” Rampert shouted.
Werthstein paused for a moment, then looked Matt in the eyes.
“Will God forgive me?”
Matt continued to look at Werthstein, unable to remove his eyes from the man who might have rigged the terrorists with the ultimate weapon. The enemy could find what it wanted, mass on the target, and destroy.
“Perhaps—as soon as we kill these bastards,” Matt said, standing.
Matt walked to and leaned over a small computer terminal that was hooked up to the satellite antennae atop the MC-130. He typed a quick e-mail and sent it to the one person in the world he felt he could trust right now.
Stepping back, he took a deep breath, slipped into his parachute, and walked toward Rampert, who quickly inspected him and handed him an M4 carbine. Matt tucked the weapon inside his parachute waistband. He donned the helmet and oxygen mask, took a couple of deep breaths, and exhaled heavily.
“Ready?” Rampert asked through the microphone in the helmet.
“We need to talk about Werthstein when we get back,” Matt said.
Rampert gave him a thumbs-up.
“One minute!” came the jump master’s voice over the loudspeaker.
Matt watched as the jump master crawled along the lowered ramp. He could feel the cold air rushing into the back of the MC-130 Combat Talon. How many times had he done this as an operative for the Agency? he asked himself. He had lost count.
Matt watched the light turn green.
“Go!”
Then he was tumbling into the pitch black night with Colonel Jack Rampert and his two men.
Matt’s mind was processing about as much as the human brain could handle: terrorists on U.S. soil, nuclear Predators that fly and communicate like insects, and the remote possibility that his dead brother was alive.
Truly, Zachary’s fate was all that mattered to him as the cold Canadian night air buffeted him.
CHAPTER 29
Moncrief Lake, Quebec
It was the image of Jacques Ballantine’s face hovering directly above his own that brought Zachary Garrett/Winslow Boudreaux back to reality, like a time traveler bobsledding at warp speeds down a dark, icy tunnel. His first stop was the hot, smoky desert floor where he had first seen Ballantine’s face. Next was an apocalyptic battle in a steamy jungle valley, his last memory as Zachary Garrett.
“I must be living right.” A distant voice invaded his reverie.
And now, a Canadian trout pond in Quebec Province.
“Hello. Captain Garrett.”
Zachary Garrett pulled out from the day dream. He tried to shade his eyes from the lamplight, but realized he was handcuffed with what seemed to be a plastic flex cuff much like a trash bag tie, though much stronger, when his hands wouldn’t respond. He wiggled them behind his back only to feel the sharp edges of the plastic cut into his wrists. His ankles were tied to the legs of the chair. He struggled to bring the face hovering above him into focus.
“We meet again. But this time we are on a different battlefield. Mine.”
Zachary surveyed his confines. He noticed the large rafters in the ceiling of what looked like a cabin. There were the usual accompaniments of a lakeside cabin: a wooden table and chairs; some older, overstuffed furniture; and a wooden stairway to a loft above the kitchen.
He vaguely remembered a mission to snatch a target from his command post. The memories of his two worlds were overlapping, not without a fair amount of confusion. Then he grimaced, the face of his captor becoming clear, a dark woman standing next to him. “You . . .” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Garrett. Me.”
“Ball . . . Ballan—”
“Ballantine. Jacques Ballantine. You should remember a man’s name when you murder his brother.”
Zach struggled to remember, vague images playing in the back of his mind like an old home video poorly shot on a 16mm camera. “What does this have to do with me?” he asked, confused.
“We have, as you like to say it, ‘taken the fight to the enemy.’”
“I’m all ears,” Garrett said.
“We have initiated a plan which, you may care to know, you have only been temporarily successful in averting—”
Again Zach struggled. As Boudreaux he had a mission to kill this man. He knew little about what Ballantine was planning to do, just that it was important to kill him . . . and that he had failed.
Ballantine smiled.
“Tell me, Garrett, we all heard you were dead. How is it that you have been brought back to life?”
“Frankly, I don’t remember much about that.”
“Let me refresh your memory about one particular aspect of your history.”
“Please,” Zachary said through clenched teeth as his restraints suddenly seemed much tighter.
Ballantine lowered himself so that he was eye-level with Garrett.
“You killed my brother, shot him in the face.”
Garrett’s eyes lowered to the floor much as they had twelve years earlier in his armored personnel carrier.
“That I could never forget,” he said in a whisper.
“Nor will I ever let you forget it,” Ballantine shot back. “Your brother should be here shortly, and I intend to let you watch him die at my hands, just as you did to me. Then, I suspect I will let you live so that you can experience the years of never-ending pain that only seems to grow as time passes.”
<
br /> Garrett lifted his head and met Ballantine’s stare.
It had been a long time since he had consciously thought about his younger brother, Matt, and their days of growing up on the farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. Though he suspected warm thoughts of young Matt were always there, hidden away, to have the memory come rushing back so rapidly caused a visible reaction.
“I see that I have your attention now,” Ballantine said.
“Why would Matt be coming here?”
“Because we have caused it to happen that way.”
“Who has caused it to happen that way?”
“You would be very surprised.”
“Surprise me.” Zachary studied the scar on Ballantine’s face as his rival began to speak.
“We’ve got inbound!”
Ballantine and the dark woman snapped their heads toward the door. A tall man wearing a camouflage hunting outfit and carrying an M-16 rifle came running up the steps. “Our radar showed a four-propeller airplane flying slow at twenty thousand feet,” he said. “Drop speed and altitude for jumpers.”
Ballantine looked at his watch and said, “They are early.”
He turned toward Zachary Garrett and said, “When was the last time you saw your brother?”
“How do you know he’s coming?” Zachary said.
“I just know,” Ballantine said, his eyes turning dark as coal. “I just know.” His voice trailed off as he turned toward the messenger.
“They’ll be coming from the landing strip area either down the ridge or along the lake. Place one team on each approach ready to ambush. But I want Matt Garrett alive at all costs. Do you understand?” Ballantine said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Virginia, you stay here with Garrett. I will return with his brother.”
“Gladly,” she said, fondling her pistol.
Ballantine secured his rifle and turned toward Garrett. “This is really better than I could have ever hoped. Finding you has given me new life, new purpose. Now I even care about the other things that are about to happen.”
Then he was gone into the Canadian evening.
