by Larry Bond
Calvin hoped the man had a clear target.
He ran toward the injured policeman, but two paramedics beat him there. They dropped to the ground beside the groaning man, feverishly stripping off his riot gear as they tried to treat his wound.
Calvin knelt close by, putting the riot cop’s helmet, gas mask, and bulletproof vest on as fast as they came off. He snatched up the fallen officer’s baton and clear Plexiglas shield, and took his place in the shrinking police line.
He could see the crowd more clearly now. They were only a hundred yards away—close enough to make out individuals. Somehow, though, the rioters all looked the same. Young men in dark clothing ran, shouted, and taunted the police. All were black or Hispanic. Bottles and other missiles flew out of the darkness toward the police line. Most fell short. A few clattered off their upraised shields.
Calvin slid into position and immediately felt a little more secure, although he knew that was illusory. He was part of a disciplined line of trained men, but the chaos they were facing made him feel like an island of sand facing the raging ocean.
He stiffened, readying himself, as a band of screaming young toughs suddenly shoved their way forward out of the crowd. Some were waving baseball bats or tire irons.
THUMMP. A tear-gas canister sailed over his head and landed in the middle of the advancing teens. They scattered.
A ball of flame blossomed skyward in the middle of the plaza. Calvin guessed that was a car’s fuel tank cooking off.
The command came for them to step back, and he backed up in line with the others.
Now Calvin could hear a bullhorn blaring somewhere out in front. Somewhere out in the middle of the mob. He couldn’t hear the words, but he could hear their rhythm and pitch. Did this beast have a brain? The thought frightened him, and only his training steadied him. They stepped back again.
The crowd actually drew away from him and the other riot police, and for a moment he hoped they had grown bored or were more interested in easier prey. Then he saw that they were clustering around the bonfire from the burning car. The voice shouting through the bullhorn was still indistinct, but he could hear cheers and answering shouts from the throng.
Suddenly, almost as one, they turned to face the police, and Calvin knew what the man with the bullhorn had been saying. The cops are the enemy. Kill them. Take their weapons. Simple, brutal instructions—commands the crowd was ready to obey.
The mass started to move forward, and he fought down a feeling that the whole thing was headed straight at him. He tried to pick out individuals at the edge and saw that while they were eager to shout, they were reluctant to challenge the police line physically. Pushed from behind, though, they did advance, first walking and then running.
Calvin heard more feet slamming onto the pavement behind him, and knew that the line was being extended as every able-bodied officer joined them. Would it be enough? If they were outflanked …
Haskin’s voice bellowed, “Guard!”
He brought his baton up, ready to take the shock and defend himself. The mob seemed as big as the ocean, and the tide was coming in.
“Advance!”
Calvin blinked. The tactical manuals said the best defense was a good offense, but who ever heard of a shoreline advancing to meet the waves? Nevertheless, he took one step in unison with the officers on either side, paused a moment, and then went forward again, falling into the well-drilled rhythm designed to cow an unruly crowd.
More tear-gas canisters landed right in front of them. The yelling people nearest to the gray haze recoiled for a second and then were pushed forward by the vast throng behind them. Some fell, retching, and were swallowed up.
With a heart-stopping, guttural roar, the mob slammed into the advancing police line.
A short, skinny teenager rushed Calvin first, trying to grab his baton. The policeman easily dodged his outstretched hands and brought the baton around in a slashing blow. The boy screamed and ducked back, clutching a broken wrist.
Another man, older and much larger, tried to tear the shield out of Calvin’s grip. Pain shot up his forearm as he slammed the baton down across the attacker’s arm and then again across the man’s head. The rioter went down in a boneless heap.
After that, the struggle disintegrated into a flurry of half-seen, half-felt, and half-remembered blows and counterblows, strike and counterstrike. His earlier fears submerged by the primal urge to survive, Calvin fought calmly and effectively. But no matter how many rioters he knocked down or drove off, there was a seemingly endless supply of others still surging forward in an effort to tear him apart.
Twice he heard Haskins pulling the police line back to tighten its sagging formation. He saw another policeman dragged down and grimaced. They were running out of men and maneuvering room.
And still the mob came on.
Calvin felt a bullet whiz past his head and heard the deafening sound of a shot close by in the same moment. His eyes focused on a man in his twenties, heavy-set and bald, coldly aiming a pistol at him at point-blank range.
Oh, hell.
The man fired again and Calvin felt his shield take the bullet this time, deflecting it, but the shock of its impact ran up his arm. It felt like his elbow had been hit by a ball peen hammer. He staggered backward.
The gunman fired a third time. This time the round tore through the Plexiglas shield and slammed into his bulletproof vest. At such short range, the 9mm slug had enough velocity to shock and bruise him, but the shield and vest stopped it from doing more damage.
His assailant snarled in frustration, acting as though the policeman had broken the rules by not falling down dead. The man raised his aim, pointing the pistol straight at Calvin’s unprotected face.
No! He didn’t have time to draw his own weapon.
Calvin lunged forward and slammed the point of his baton into the gunman’s sternum. As the man doubled over in agony, he slashed downward, striking him across the back of the neck, just below the skull. That was potentially a killing blow, but the policeman didn’t give a damn. There was only one law operating right now—the law of survival.
He looked up, gasping for breath, and realized that he was surrounded by screaming, shouting rioters. His lunge had carried him well out into the midst of the mob.
People swarmed past him, pouring through the sudden gap in the police line. Others dove on top of him, knocking him over as they tried to pull off his helmet or grab his weapons. His shield protected him from many of their blows, but it also trapped one of his arms. Punches and kicks rained down in an unrelenting hail. Something sharp stabbed into his leg. He felt himself being driven down into unconsciousness.
Calvin struggled desperately to get up off the ground. Staying down meant dying.
A baseball bat swung overhand caught his shield and knocked him back down. Someone else stomped on his wrist and grabbed his baton away. The world blurred in a red fog.
Shots rang out suddenly. Calvin felt the pressure on him slacken as his attackers turned away in surprise. Seconds later, another ragged volley cut across the crowd noise. Somebody was firing tear-gas guns—a lot of them. A dozen brilliant beams of white light lanced into the plaza, blinding rioters caught staring at them and turning night into artificial day.
Clouds of gray mist billowed up from each gas canister. The mob began coughing, gagging as the tear gas rolled over them. Their shouts changed swiftly in tone from anger and hate to fear.
Calvin heard the growing roar of diesel engines moving closer.
The crowd began backing away, slowly at first, and then faster. More and more of them turned to flee.
Still barely clinging to consciousness, Calvin lifted his head just high enough to see what was going on. Hundreds of soldiers in full battle gear and gas masks were advancing across the wreckage-strewn Renaissance Center Plaza. Armored personnel carriers mounting searchlights trundled behind the troops.
Suddenly, Bob Calvin lay alone. He tried to get up, but his right leg cr
umpled under him and he landed heavily on the pavement. The ground seemed very cold. He heard someone calling for a stretcher as he surrendered at last to the pain filling every corner of his being.
11:30 P.M., EST
ABC News Special Report: “Shutdown”
The ABC News Special Report showed signs of being hurriedly assembled. Half the video aired was live or only minutes old. And none of the news was good.
The Midwest’s phone system was still down, and it would remain down for the foreseeable future. Caught without the ability to communicate, tens of thousands of businesses had been forced to close, idling millions of workers. So far the only beneficiaries of the disaster had been messenger services. Most normal commerce had ground to a halt. The economic losses alone were already estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.
But there were other, far more serious losses. Detroit was not alone. With police and emergency services degraded, every major city in the region had experienced a vicious crime wave. The governors of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa had all mobilized their National Guard units by midafternoon and instituted an immediate nighttime curfew. Hundreds were already dead, and hundreds more were seriously injured in the continuing civil disorder.
Pressed hard for an explanation, company representatives now blamed “an external cause, most likely the deliberate sabotage of the switching network by a highly sophisticated computer virus.”
This claim was immediately backed up by several electronics and computer experts. In the blink of an eye, the phone company went from villain to victim. The news also transformed the ongoing catastrophe from an unavoidable act of God to an act of deliberate, calculated terror.
The final piece of the ABC News Special was an interview with Senator George Roland, one of the few survivors of the National Press Club bombing. Since the attack, Roland had acquired immense standing, and he used every ounce of it in making his points.
“There is no doubt that these terrorists are bent on destroying American society. The government can no longer deny that these attacks are part of a larger plan. Unless the administration acts swiftly, strongly, and positively, our nation may not survive.”
No one disagreed.
NOVEMBER 30
Midwest Telephone’s primary operations center
With Jim Johnston standing next to her, Maggie Kosinski dialed the boss’s number. Light-headed, almost shaking with fatigue and excitement, she hit the last digit and then looked again at the diskette on her desk. The label read simply “Alpha Virus.”
An urgent, pleading voice answered on the first ring. “Yes?”
“This is Kosinski in Operations,” she announced. “We’ve got it!”
“Hang on.”
After a short pause, she heard, “This is Taylor.” Midwest Telephone’s CEO sounded almost as tired as she did, almost as tired as they all were. Nobody had gotten much sleep in the past three days.
Kosinski forced herself to speak calmly and distinctly. “We’ve confirmed our initial diagnosis, sir. We were able to track down the virus and its source, and we’ve started a reboot. The whole system will be back on-line in forty-five minutes.”
“Thank God!” Taylor breathed. His voice sharpened. “Where was the damned thing hidden?”
Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk with a pen. She didn’t even want to touch it with her bare hands. “In one of our printers, sir.”
“What?!”
She explained further. “Some clever bastard hid the virus inside our laser printer ROM chip—piggybacked onto its normal code in several pieces. Every time we rebooted, it would reassemble the pieces and reinfect the system from scratch.” She shook her head at the vicious intelligence behind the attack, half in unwilling admiration and half in anger. “We got lucky or we’d probably still be looking for it. One of my techs turned the printer off to clear a paper jam and forgot to turn it back on. While it was off, we rebooted the system again and everything started to come back online. But as soon as we powered up the printer, the virus reappeared.”
“Good God!” Taylor exclaimed. He hesitated. “Have you discovered any more nasty surprises lurking out there?”
“Yes, sir.” Kosinski’s lips thinned. “We found the same type of altered ROM chip in every switching center’s printer. They’d all been serviced in the past two months.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yeah.” Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk again. “This is no virus I’ve ever seen or heard of, sir. I’ve already passed the ROM chip we found here to the FBI and the Computer Emergency Response Team. It’s their baby now.”
Personally, she wished them luck. Virusland was a mysterious and spooky place, full of secrecy and strange personalities. It took a special kind of weirdo, she thought, to write a program that deliberately fouled up a computer.
And someone out there, some terrorist, had gone straight to the top of a very twisted bunch to find this little gem.
CHAPTER 19
BACKLASH
DECEMBER 2
Falls Church, northern Virginia
Helen Gray fought off the last clinging tendrils of a nightmare and woke up, suddenly aware that she was all alone in the rumpled bed. She opened her eyes. The glowing digits on his bedside clock read 1:41 A.M. Where had Peter gone?
She pushed herself upright and looked around the room. The lights were off, but her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. Her lips curved upward in a smile as she noticed the pieces of clothing strewn across the floor from the half-open door all the way over to the bed. Someday she and Peter Thorn were going to have to learn to set a somewhat slower, less frantic pace in their lovemaking.
But not now. After weeks of strain and enforced separation, neither of them could have been expected to restrain themselves for very long. And they hadn’t.
With her section on a twelve-hour stand-down, Helen had driven straight to Peter’s town house. She remembered falling into his arms as soon as he opened the front door. Her memories after that were a tangled mix of roving hands, parted lips, motion, warmth, and finally, a swelling, crashing wave of sheer ecstasy.
Sleep had come after—a welcome slide into restful oblivion that had been broken only by an old nightmare from her childhood. A nightmare of being hunted through an endless maze of narrow, dead-end corridors and impossible turnings. It was an evil dream that had come back to haunt her in these past several weeks as she and her fellow FBI agents grappled with their faceless, nameless foes.
Helen glanced at the empty place beside her and guessed that the nightmare had begun only after Peter left her side. She shook off the last wisps of sleep.
Her nose twitched as she caught the welcome smell of coffee wafting in through the open doorway. She slid out of bed, threw on one of his shirts, and glided quietly out into the hallway.
The lights were on in the guest bedroom Peter used as a work space. She pushed open the unlatched door and went inside.
Wearing only a pair of ash-gray Army sweatpants, Peter Thorn sat at a desk, paging steadily through a stack of reports she had forwarded from the FBI task force. Under enormous pressure from above for results, Special Agent Flynn’s initial reluctance to share their information with the government’s other counterterrorist units had faded somewhat.
Peter had pinned a large map of the United States to the wall above his desk. Color-coded pins marked the location of different terrorist attacks. His light brown hair was tousled and his green eyes looked weary. A forgotten cup of coffee sat cooling beside a calculator and a pocket calendar.
Helen leaned over and put her arms around him. “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked softly.
He looked around with the same wry, boyish grin that had first attracted her to him. “Nope. Sorry.” He tapped the disordered pile of papers in front of him. “I just can’t seem to stop going over and over these reports in my mind.”
“What are you looking for?”
Thorn shrugged tiredly. “I’m no
t sure exactly. Maybe some pattern we haven’t spotted yet. Some common method of operations or choice of targets.”
She nodded slowly. “Not a bad idea, Peter. Nobody on our task force has the time or energy to look very hard at the big picture. Everybody’s locked into the little piece of the puzzle they’re directly responsible for investigating.”
“What about Flynn?”
Helen shook her head. “He tries. But every time he starts pulling all our data together, it seems like somebody from the White House calls for another briefing. Or he has to fend off the press or the Congress. There are too many distractions. Too many conflicting demands on his time.” She nodded toward his desk. “So, are you finding anything interesting in all of that?”
Peter grimaced. “Nothing solid. Just an ugly sneaking suspicion that we’re looking in the wrong goddamned place for these bastards. I’m beginning to think we’re not dealing with domestic terrorism at all. That maybe most of what’s been happening is something that was planned and organized overseas. That we could be facing a single, coordinated terrorist effort.”
Helen straightened up to her full height, suddenly very alert. “Explain.”
His mouth turned down even more. “I wish I could. It’s more a feeling than anything else.” He pushed some of the FBI incident reports to one side. “Look, discount the background noise—the murders and penny-ante bombings conducted by the second-raters and punks we’ve already caught. Right?”
She nodded. Each large-scale terrorist massacre or bombing seemed to spawn half a dozen or more copycat acts—most by known psychos or members of hate groups already under FBI surveillance. The legwork involved in running those incidents down consumed precious time and resources, but it never seemed to bring them any closer to the people who were doing the real damage.
“Well, then, take another look at what’s left. Bombings and massacres that jump from D.C. to Seattle, to Chicago, then back to D.C., and on to Dallas. More bombs that hit L.A. and Louisville on the same day. Then another series of bombs and ambushes back in this area. And now this communications virus in the Midwest.” Thorn jabbed a finger at the map as he spoke, pinpointing each separate incident. “Every attack is professionally planned and executed. Every attack strikes a new area and a new type of target. And every attack spreads our personnel and resources across a wider and wider area.”
