by Bob Mayer
DiSalvo broke the silence, speaking to Kopec. “Get me a Satcom link.”
Kopec opened up the small dish and set it on the floor of the Zodiac. Then he turned on the radio. He checked, then passed the handset to DiSalvo. “We’re five by five with Atlanta. Transmission is scrambled and secure.”
DiSalvo took the handset and squeezed the transmit button. “This is your Warrior. Over.”
He listened for a long time, almost a minute. His reply to whatever he’d been told was succinct. “I am God’s sword. Out.” He gave the handset to Kopec.
Kopec took it and then turned to pack up the dish and radio. Behind him, DiSalvo drew his garrote and before Angelique could react from the bow of the boat, slid it over Kopec’s head, pulling the wire tight against the young man’s throat. As he did this, DiSalvo whirled his own body, so that his back was to Kopec’s. The Jesuit leaned forward, pulling Kopec up onto his back by the garrote.
Kopec’s arms and legs flailed uselessly as the metal sliced into his neck. Blood spewed forth. His efforts actually assisted the serrated wire cutting into his neck, the metal slicing through skin, muscle and cartilage. Both carotid arteries burst, splattering the interior of the boat and the gear.
“What the hell are you doing?” Angelique cried out, scrambling from the front of the Zodiac toward the two men. In the rear boat, Gates jumped to his feet, the stock of his MP-5 tight to his shoulder, the red dot from the laser sight centered on DiSalvo’s forehead, his finger resting on the trigger.
The garrote passed through Kopec’s windpipe and frothy red liquid bubbled forth.
Angelique knew the technician was dead. DiSalvo’s attack was the way a commando would use a garrote, and it was fast and effective. She had no clue what had prompted it, and she could see that Gates kept the red dot on DiSalvo’s forehead as the Jesuit lowered Kopec to the floorboards. Angelique slapped DiSalvo across the face, getting his attention from his blood lust.
“Why did you do that?” she demanded.
DiSalvo leaned over, and with some difficulty, extracted the garrote from the depths of Kopec’s half-severed neck as blood pooled underneath his head. He looked up at Angelique. Gates’ boat had now drawn alongside and DiSalvo glanced over and noted that Gates had his weapon trained on him.
“He was a spy,” DiSalvo said.
Angelique knelt next to the body and, out of reflex, checked his pulse. She looked up at DiSalvo. “How do you know that?”
“The Head told me.”
From the other boat, Gates had his own question. “How did the Head know that?”
DiSalvo slowly turned to face the soldier. The red dot was on his forehead. “Lower your weapon.”
“How did the Head know Kopec was a spy?” Gates kept his aim.
“One does not question the Head of the Brotherhood,” DiSalvo said. Seeing that Gates was not responding, the muscles on his face tightened. “Kopec made a transmission last night after we were all asleep to Illuminati headquarters. Also, right after Kopec departed Atlanta, his immediate superior, Brother Abaku, had security run an in-depth investigation. They found undisputable evidence that Kopec had been suborned by the Illuminati.”
Gates slowly lowered the sub-machinegun.
“So you’re judge, jury and executioner?” Hyland demanded.
“Yes,” DiSalvo said, “I am.” He pulled out a key and unlocked the metal case from Kopec’s wrist. Then he grabbed Kopec’s body, and dangled it on the side armor.
“What are you doing?” Angelique asked.
“This is all a betrayer deserves,” DiSalvo said as he shoved Kopec over the side into the dark water. It bobbed there for several seconds, then the water began to churn.
“You fool,” Angelique snapped. “Now we’ll have every predator in the water, every Piranha for miles, following us.”
DiSalvo turned to her. “Get back to your position. We keep moving.”
In the second boat, Gates let the MP-5 drop to the end of its sling. He sat down and wrapped his hand around the throttle. Lee seemed unaffected by what had just happened, but Hyland was pale.
“Never seen someone be killed?” Gates asked.
“No, but I caused someone’s death,” Hyland said in a low voice.
“I didn’t know archeology was such a dangerous field of study.” Gates turned up the throttle and they fell in behind the first boat. Gates noted that Angelique had angled herself so that while she was still watching up-stream, she was also keeping an eye on DiSalvo.
Hyland turned to Gates. “You asked why I was here.”
“And you never really answered,” Gates said. “Yes, I get that you’re an expert on Judas, but that’s not good enough.” He tapped his chest. “I think everyone here has a secret. Kopec was a double-agent.” He nodded toward the first boat. “Angelique is a lost soul who has no clue who her parents were or why she was abandoned in the jungle. DiSalvo, well the way he handles weapons tells me that wasn’t his first kill. So a man who kills for God. That’s gray if not black inside of him. So what’s inside you?”
“I was weak once,” Hyland said.
Gates said nothing and they continued for another kilometer before Hyland continued, as if some force were in her, pressing to get out. “I made someone love me for the wrong reasons.”
“Mighty powerful, aren’t you?” Gates said.
Hyland shook her head. “You know nothing of love. It’s written all over you.”
“None of us are what we appear to be,” Gates said. “Whoever it was, they had their own reason for falling in love. Not returning it isn’t weak. Who was it?”
“One of my professors. I needed a fellowship. He was nice enough. We never even consummated the affair. But I made him think of possibilities. He went too far and lost his common sense. His wife left him. He was probably going to lose his job once she went public.”
“His problem,” Gates said.
“He’d left the window in his office open. It was storming outside. A strong wind. I still remember the very tips of his shoes grazing the top of his desk. Just a matter of inches. His neck was so stretched from the noose, I wondered if he might not have been trying so hard to get his weight back under him. If he realized he’d made a mistake over a lie. He’d trusted me. And all I cared about was the fellowship. He was a stepping stone.”
Lee was studiously ignoring both of them, as if what they were discussing held no import.
“Are you sure you didn’t love him?” Gates asked.
“He’d asked me to come with him to a new university the week before,” Hyland said. “I’d told him yes, sure, I still needed him. On his desk, under his feet was the printout for my fellowship. With my signature. Which meant I’d lied. I’d betrayed him. I wasn’t going off to some backwater college with him to spend the rest of my days. I was moving on, leaving him behind.”
“Are you sure you didn’t love him?” Gates repeated.
“I didn’t know what love was,” Hyland said.
“And you do now?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
Hyland stared at him with eyes fierce with memories best left buried. “Love is when someone can trust you with their life.”
Plesetsk, Russia
The Russians had rockets ready on two platforms. One was an aging Soyuz rocket and the other a Proton boasting more advanced technology. Despite being introduced in 1966, the Soyuz Rocket was still the solid workhorse of the Russian space fleet. Unlike other systems, the Soyuz was put together horizontally and transported to the launch pad. Several more Soyuz, quickly pulled out of storage, were in various stages of being readied, a line of rockets stretching over a mile long as workers swarmed over them. Retired workers had been dragged out of their apartments and pressed into work to get the rockets ready.
The Proton lifted first, roaring toward the Intruder on a plume of flame. Five minutes later, the Soyuz booster engines, strapped around the main rocket, ignited.
And then the en
tire thing exploded.
Shrapnel and searing jet fuel mushroomed out, blanketing everyone within half a mile of the epicenter. The nuclear warhead fell to the ground in the middle of the inferno. The safeguards kept it from detonating, but the conventional explosive that was to detonate the core went off, scattering radioactive material into the fire. As the blaze continued, plutonium lifted up into the smoke.
The Russians working the area who survived understood exactly what was going on. They knew that the area was contaminated. They also knew the importance of their mission. As emergency crews cleared the dead and wounded, leaders rallied their workers.
Like they had during the Chernobyl clean up and containment, the Russians continued to work, moving the next Soyuz rocket to the alternative launching site, even as they all received fatal does of radiation.
Sriharikota, India
The General looked at the display on the blood-smeared cell phone, and then tossed it on his desk. Two guards held a prisoner, the phone’s owner, between them. He’d been beaten, his face sporting a dozen gashes, his nose pulverized. One arm dangled, broken in three places.
“After all these years, Japur,” the General said. “You have been here since the beginning, since Smiling Budha was detonated in seventy-four. To find you are a spy. It should sadden me.”
Japur tried to stand tall, but broken ribs forced him to remain slightly hunched over. Indeed, if the guards weren’t holding his shoulders, he’d probably collapse.
The General stood. “It does not sadden me.” He was a three star general in the Indian Army. Only one other General outranked him, but in reality, he held the ultimate power in the country, because at this base, under his command, were the bulk of India’s nuclear arsenal.
The General stood in front of Japur. “It enrages me.” He drew his gold-plated pistol and whipped the barrel across Jupar’s face. The sound of his cheekbone cracking echoed in the office.
“Do you understand what is going on?” the General demanded.
Japur said nothing. One eye was already swollen shut. The other eye stared at the General as if Japur could see through him, to something on the other side.
“Those four bombs are to help save the planet,” the General said. “And all you care about is Pakistan? You were born Indian. You’ve been in India all your life. Why would you spy for those pigs?”
Japur finally spoke, the words tumbling out, along with a broken tooth. “I do not spy for them. I work for peace. I tell them what happens here. So they know. So we keep the peace. I am Indian. But I am a scientist and I am part of this madness. These bombs. Their bombs. I told them those American bombs are to be sent into space. But they have been here for hours. You have not loaded them onto the rockets as our President promised the Americans. You loaded our own bombs. You could use those other bombs against Pakistan and the signature would be that of America. It would cause great confusion. You are playing a dangerous game, General, trying to gain power. You do not care about saving the planet. You care about power. You would climb on the shoulders of a drowning man to gain power.”
A muscle along the side of the General’s jaw rippled in anger. “You fool. What do you think the Pakistanis will do now? Now that they know about these bombs? You called them over three hours ago!”
“They knew about them before I called,” Japur said. “The Americans told them. But now they know you haven’t loaded them on the missiles as you promised the Americans. What happens now is on your head, General.”
The General pulled back the slide on the pistol and pointed the gun at Japur’s one open eye. “No, Japur. It is your head.”
He pulled the trigger.
Kandahar Airport, Afghanistan
The battered hanger was just off the southern end of the main runway at Kandahar Airport, over half a mile away from any other buildings. Tight security surrounded it, and people passing through the airport wondered what it could possibly contain that rated so much protection.
The hanger housed a force the size of an entire Special Forces battalion. 15 A-Teams. Each team consisting of twelve highly trained Green Berets. Men whose expertise was desperately needed in the War on Terror. Almost every man in the hanger was a combat veteran, nearly all with several tours under their belt. Yet they’d been sitting in this hanger for months on their current rotation, without a single combat mission conducted. They sat and they planned and they rehearsed. Then they rethought their plans, revised them, considered contingencies. And then more contingencies. Murphy’s Law was figured into everything. What can go wrong, will go wrong.
There had been a Special Forces battalion stationed in this hanger since 2002. A company rotated out at four-month intervals, replaced by another company, each serving a six-month tour of duty. There were always three companies, five teams in each. The headquarters element, more commonly known as the C-Team, rotated every eighteen months to ensure stability.
Not a man there liked the assignment. First, they never saw combat and these were true soldiers. Waiting was toxic to them. Second, the mission they were planning for was one thought up in a fancy room, by men in suits, none of whom would ever have to experience the reality of actually accomplishing the mission. A plank above the door leading to the main briefing room summed it up, carved there by some sergeant years earlier: Nothing is impossible to the man who doesn’t have to do it!
Unfortunately, today it looked like they were going to have to do it.
Spy satellites, NSA interceptions, a handful of human intelligence (HUMINT) from people actually in Pakistan; all the information—and there was a considerable amount—was thrown into the blender of analysts and they distilled intelligence out of it: usable information.
And the reams of intelligence pointed to one inescapable conclusion: Pakistan was escalating to their equivalent of DEFCON-4, and would most likely launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against India.
The two countries had first clashed in 1947 as soon as they were parted. Three more ‘official’ wars followed. But peace, even between the ‘official’ wars, had never truly been peace. Pakistan had been the brainchild of an ailing and dying British Empire to establish a Muslim state separate from the Hindu majority state of India. Like most things born of religion, whether it was India-Pakistan or the Church of England out of Catholicism, blood followed.
Those men in suits, who were actually rather smart, had deduced one inescapable fact: the most likely place on the face of the planet for a nuclear war to start was between Pakistan and India. And the most likely place for terrorists to get a nuclear weapon was Pakistan. The threat of an Islamic revolution in the country loomed over every decision made about it.
Thus, a battalion strength Special Forces unit sat at Kandahar focused on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons’ underground storage sites. Their mission: make sure those bombs never saw the light of day. Their code name: Task Force Kali. Named after the Hindu goddess, the dark one.
As the klaxon that none had ever wished to hear sounded, the men of Task Force Kali grabbed their gear and headed toward the briefing room. On the landing strip outside the hangers, helicopters and MC-130 cargo Talons began to land.
The wait was over.
A message was sent to the two-man recon team on the mountain overlooking the bunker the Pakistanis thought was so secret.
Three years into the mission, shifting through mounds of information and finally infiltrating men (and some female soldiers) under cover into Afghanistan, Task Force Kali had come to a startling conclusion. While it was publicly estimated that Pakistan had seventy to ninety nuclear warheads spread across half a dozen secure holding facilities, the reality was much different.
Task Forces Kali believed—and were betting the lives of the men of the battalion, and the fate of those who would be targeted by those warheads—that there were only thirty-eight functional nukes. And they were all secreted in one central location so that command and control could be positively maintained.
It was logical th
at the Pakistanis would do that. It was smart. And it made Task Force Kali’s mission attainable: stop those nukes from ever leaving that bunker and going to their delivery platforms.
Unfortunately, during war game scenarios, the casualty rate for the one-hundred-ninety-six men of Kali was estimated at eighty to ninety percent, with a less than a ten percent chance of success. Ultimately, the last resort would be multiple cruise missile strikes on the facility, the drawback beind such an attach would likely start a larger war.
The teams at Kandahar prepared to load their helicopters and aircraft for what was most likely a one-way mission. A message was scrambled. It bounced off a satellite and down-linked to the two-man recon team that had eyeballs on the target to let them know the moment they’d planned for had arrived, and to take the first steps of that plan.
The Xangu River, The Amazon
They could hear the roar of rapids ahead. The riverbank grew rockier. Angelique guided the lead boat to a well-worn landing site on the left bank, just before the river narrowed to a canyon. The rock walls on either side suddenly shot up fifty feet just in front of them. Besides what was above the Devil’s Fork, the Devil’s Gorge had stopped many an explorer.
The bow of the Zodiac grated on the pebbles. Gates landed the second one next to it and everyone gathered in front of the boats.
Angelique pointed at a narrow trail that cut through undergrowth to the base of the rock wall and a trail that switch backed up. “We tie off lines to the boats. Then we climb with them up to the top. There are pulleys permanently in place up there. We pull up one of the boats. Leave the other.” She glanced at DiSalvo. “It will be tight with just five, but we can do it.”
Gates shook his head. “It’s too heavy.”
“Correct,” Angelique said. “The armor must go.”
Gates didn’t argue. DiSalvo stood off to the side, above participating. Gates began removing the armor plating. After a moment’s hesitation, the others joined in. They dumped the heavy plating on the shore. Angelique attached a line to the first boat. They shoved the boat back in the water, holding it steady against the current, with Hyland, Angelique and Lee assisting Gates. The team began the climb up, spooling out the rope behind. DiSalvo was on point, weapon at the ready. Slung over his back was Kopec’s metal case.
