Ghost pos-1

by John Ringo

“Wouldn’t they have had to reshape the explosives and the plutonium?” Mike asked.

  “No, these older nukes are remarkably stable that way,” Jameson said, shrugging. “They had to replace the tritium; it would have degraded. And the plutonium might be a little degraded. But I’m ninety percent sure, based on the evidence, that we’re going to get some sort of nuclear reaction. What gets me is the rest of the evidence.”

  “What’s that?” Mike asked. “The lead smell?”

  “Yeah,” Jameson said, leading him over to the side of one of the bubble tents. “See those?” he asked, pointing to some metal pieces on one of the tables. “Those are metal bars that have been cut with an arc welder. And there were large bolts sitting on the floor.” Jameson waved to one of the space-suited guys and made a motion like turning a wrench. The person in the bubble went over to another table and picked up a bolt, turning it back and forth.

  “Can I see it up close?” Mike asked. “How hot is it?”

  “It’s not hot enough to bother about,” Jameson said, walking over to the entrance and waving for the bolt to be brought over. “About like a tritium watchface. The shavings that were on the floor were hot as hell, though.”

  “Yeah, I ran into those,” Mike said. “Slid through them, to be precise.”

  “Jesus,” the NEST team leader said, his eyes wide. “You need to be decontaminated!”

  “I took a shower,” Mike said, shrugging and turning the bolt around and around. It was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “I’ll survive. I’ve survived worse, trust me. A little radiation’s good for you. So we’ve got metal bars and big bolts. Anything else?”

  “Well, they were melting and pouring lead,” Jameson said, looking at him askance. “And there’s a big crane,” he continued, pointing to the device. “That’s cold as snow. It wasn’t in contact with the live weapon. For the rest, I’d suggest you talk to the forensic guys.”

  Mike walked back over to Northcote, who was talking with a civilian in a rumpled suit and a major with an IFOR MP brassard.

  “You the forensics guys?” Mike asked.

  “Major Forester,” the major said, shaking his hand. “And Agent Wilson with the FBI.”

  “Pleased ta meetcha,” Wilson said in a thick New York accent. “What do you think?”

  “They encased the nuke in lead,” Mike said. “That way it can’t be detected as readily. Probably rigged it to blow. Maybe a timer, but more likely a cell phone. Maybe more than one. I’d want the ability to turn it off.”

  “My guess, too,” Wilson said, looking at him sharply. “But what did they move it in?”

  “Big engine,” Mike said, holding up the bolt. “But what kind? Any read on the bolt?”

  “Used in various systems,” Wilson said, shrugging. “Engine blocks, mostly.”

  “That’s where I’ve seen it,” Mike said. “When we had to strip down the engine on my boat. A Volvo diesel.”

  “That’s one of them,” Wilson said, nodding. “Also Mercedes. But if the nuke is stuck in an engine cavity, the engine isn’t running. So we’re looking for a big truck with an engine that’s not running?”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Mike said. “Major, what do you have?”

  “There was the proverbial little old lady,” the major said, pulling out a pad. “One Branca Obilic, eighty-three. She’s lived in this area since, as she put it, the good old days when Tito was in charge. Never been run out, not even by the war. Was a refugee for a few days and came back. One hard-nosed bitch of a Serb, too; she only talked to us because nobody else would listen to her. But she knew something different was going on here and kept an eye on it. She said that about two days after the van turned up, and it was never moved, a large white truck pulled into the warehouse. It was here for about three hours, maybe more, but she’s sure of at least three hours. That was three days ago. It was an odd vehicle. It had a tractor front end but a short rear with doors on the side and back. Personnel doors on the side and double doors on the back. We’ve got the description out to IFOR, the Bosnian police and Interpol. It shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “Yes it will,” Mike said, frowning.

  “It’s a pretty unusual vehicle,” Forester protested. “There can’t be many vehicles like that in Bosnia. Europe for that matter.”

  “What you just described is a press van,” Mike said, sighing. “There are thousands of them in Europe. And if we start stopping all of them, somebody is going to figure out what is going on.”

  “Shit,” Forester said, angrily. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You’ve been too close to the problem,” Mike said, thinking. “Okay, but what is the engine? Generator.”

  “There’s one of those in those press vans,” Wilson said, nodding. “Good call.”

  “Okay,” Mike said thoughtfully. “They put the nuke in the engine, holding it in place with the bars, then poured hot lead around it? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “There are some bits of stainless steel around, too,” Wilson said. “I’d wondered what those were. They must have enclosed it in a sleeve, then poured the lead around it.”

  “That is going to make it a bitch to disarm,” Forester said.

  “Nicht scheiss,” Mike replied. “No shit. What’s going on in Europe right now?” he asked rhetorically.

  “There’s always something being covered by the press,” Northcote said, shrugging.

  “Any American officials going to a summit?” Mike asked. “Anything like that?”

  “The G-8 meeting in Zurich!” Forester said, slapping his forehead. “Shit, that’s in a week!”

  “Could be that,” Mike said. “Let’s not get too tightly focused. But it’s a good beginning. We need to start looking at potential targets and make it clear what we’re dealing with. The nuke is in play and prepped.” He pulled out his cell phone and looked at the time. “Okay, I’m going to go find someplace that has a TV. Is there… well… a ‘real’ hotel in town?”

  “Not really,” Northcote said. “Not something like a Hilton or whatever. There are some in Sarajevo.”

  “Okay,” Mike said, sighing. “Northcote, get somebody coming up with a target list. But I’m going to go watch TV in Sarajevo and try to go on hunch. It’s been working so far.”

  He keyed his cell phone and punched in the number the pilot had given him.

  “We’re going to Sarajevo next,” Mike said. “Just a hop. We’ll probably be going somewhere after that.”

  * * *

  Mike walked out of the warehouse thoughtfully, then down to the brothel.

  “You again,” Kovacic said. The brothel was in full swing and Mike could see several military uniforms in the room.

  “We need to talk,” Mike replied, putting his hand on the man’s arm and leading him to the back rooms.

  “I want to buy Magdelena,” Mike said when they’d entered his cluttered office. Apparently running a brothel was like any business, because most of the clutter was paper and there was a computer on the desk.

  “You won’t be able to take her out of the country,” Kovacic said, frowning.

  “Yeah, I will,” Mike replied. “Trust me.”

  “And she is very expensive,” the pimp added. “I had to pay very much for her.”

  “How expensive?”

  “Fifty thousand euros,” Kovacic replied.

  “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it,” Mike said, laughing. “I can buy a girl just as good in Eagle Market for five thousand. And younger. I’ll give you ten.”

  After a good bit of dickering, with Kovacic referring to Magdelena as his daughter and Mike threatening to leave twice, they got the price down to twenty-five thousand euros.

  “Fine, fine.” Mike sighed, lifting his bag onto the desk and dipping into it. “Go tell her to get ready to leave.”

  When Magdelena came in the room, her eyes widened in fear at the sight of him. Which wasn’t anywhere near where he was going, but it would work for the time
being. She was carrying a small duffel bag and the hand holding the strap on her shoulder twitched nervously.

  “Here you go,” Mike said, pointing to a pile of mixed dollars and euros. “The dollar is over the euro at the moment, but I went with even so you’re a bit ahead.”

  Kovacic pulled some of the notes out at random and checked them for counterfeit, then pulled apart a couple of the bundles and started counting.

  “Can we go?” Mike asked. “I have a plane to catch.”

  “I suppose,” Kovacic said, frowning at the pile. “You were planning on buying girl?”

  “No,” Mike replied. “I tend to carry a good bit of cash on me. It’s not as if anyone was going to take it. They can feel free to try.” He took Magdelena’s hand and led her out of the office and out of the brothel to the street, then looked around for a taxi.

  “Magdelena, I treated you horribly,” Mike said, not sure if the girl was understanding what he said or not. “I can’t take that back, but I can try to improve things for you. I won’t do what I did to you again. But you have to promise me not to try to run away. Not right now. If you want to leave once we’re out of Bosnia, you can. But if you stick with me, I’ll try to do the right thing by you.”

  “Where we go?” Magdelena asked, confused.

  “Right now, Sarajevo,” Mike said. “I need a hotel with a decent TV connection.”

  He finally managed to get a taxi and directed it to the airport. Once there he went to the plane and was pleased and surprised to find that the pilot had gotten there before him.

  “We’ve completed preflight,” Hardesty told him, nodding as Mike stepped to the plane with Magdelena’s hand still in his. “Pick up a girlfriend?”

  “Something like that,” Mike replied. “I saw a TV in the plane. Can it get satellite?”

  “Of course,” Hardesty said, as he boarded. “Use the remote for channel changing. Anything from the Playboy channel to CNN.”

  “CNN is what I’m interested in,” Mike said. He settled Magdelena, her eyes wide at the sight of the plane, in one of the rear seats, then sat down opposite the large TV mounted in the rear bulkhead. He keyed it on as the plane’s engines began to whine and had found Headline News, Fox and Skynews by the time the plane was finished taxiing. His interest was Europe, and Skynews had more about Europe than Fox or Headline News. He switched around, looking for current updates.

  “I need an Internet connection,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose you have a laptop with an Internet connection on it, do you, honey?” he asked rhetorically.

  “No,” Magdelena said. “What are you do?”

  “You understand more English than you let on,” Mike replied. “I’m trying to figure out what event a terrorist attack is most likely to be against,” he continued, flipping back to Headline News. It was at the top of the hour and he listened to the news, ignoring most of the underlying commentary. President Cliff did this, what a horrible person, deaths in Iraq, Syria swearing it’s not a source of terrorism, the pope visiting Paris…

  “Wait,” Mike said, swearing, as the seven seconds devoted to the pope’s visit cycled off. Apparently the pope had suddenly become aghast at the state of Catholicism in European countries and after traveling the world had decided to work nearer home. But that was all that Mike could get in the brief bit that Headline News mentioned. And there wasn’t anything on the other channels about it, just commentators nattering about how horrible President Cliff and America were, except on Fox, where they were nattering about how horrible the other channels were.

  “Crap, crap, crap,” Mike muttered. “I need info.” He picked up his cell phone and called Northcote, but all he got was voicemail. The pope would be a perfect target; Catholics from all over France would be gathered to see him. Sure, France was increasingly an Islamic country; Muslims made up about ten percent of the population with an enormous immigration and birthrate while ethnic “French” were barely reproducing themselves. But he was sure that the incidental few hundred thousand Muslims that would be killed in a nuke strike would be of no real issue to Al Qaeda, if that was who was running the show. He thought about the terrorist “engineer” who was at the top of the list to have refurbed, and likely armed, the nuke. He wouldn’t bat an eye at killing a few hundred thousand Muslims if he could take more Christians with them. They would simply be martyrs to Allah.

  He thought about it some more and decided that his gut was telling him this was the target. So he picked up the sat phone again and dialed OSOL.

  “Office of Special Operations Liaison, Colonel Johannsen, Duty Officer, how may I help you, sir?”

  “Go scramble,” Mike said, punching in his code.

  “Scrambled.”

  “This is Mike Jenkins,” Mike said. “Pull up my file if you don’t know who I am. I need somebody to brief me on where the pope is going to be in Paris and when. I also need access to France in a private jet for myself and one undocumented female.” He felt the jet begin to reduce power, as if preparing to land, and stopped. “Wait one.” He keyed the intercom for the cockpit and whistled.

  “Sorry about this,” Mike said. “I don’t suppose we have fuel to get to Paris?”

  “We do, sir,” Hardesty replied. “I take it I should divert?”

  “If you please,” Mike said. “I have to get back to the other line.

  “Sorry about that,” he continued. “We were landing in Sarajevo. Can you get somebody to run point for me by the time we get to Paris? We’ll probably be going into DeGaulle, at a guess.”

  “I can do that,” Johannsen said. “Is this about the item?”

  “Yes. I’m running on gut. Everybody else can run around to whatever event they want, but I’m guessing it’s the pope. The timing is right, the target is right. So I’ll need high-level access.”

  “What’s the name of the undocumented female?” Johannsen asked.

  “Magdelena Averina,” Mike said, pulling the first Russian name that came to mind. “And I’m under the cover name, Michael Duncan.”

  “Got that, too,” Johannsen said. “I’ll put out the word that you’re headed there and give a heads-up to the locals.”

  “Thanks,” Mike replied. “Out here.”

  “We are not go Sarajevo?” Magdelena asked.

  “Nope,” Mike said, leaning back. “We’re on our way to the City of Light.”

  Chapter Six

  “The pope is going to do a large audience at the Stade de France and a high mass on Sunday at Notre Dame. The high mass is the culmination of a seventeen-country European tour.”

  Colonel Mark De’Courcy was one of three military attachés in the U.S. embassy in Paris. He had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, served as a junior officer in the Twenty-Fourth (later Third) Infantry Division, then up the chain, mostly in staff positions, until he had managed to wangle this assignment. And as with everyone associated with military or security work in Europe, he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep in the past two days. So he was less than thrilled about meeting some high-level, no-real-names-I’m-special agent at two in the morning at Charles DeGaulle.

  “French police are all over both events like flies,” he continued as he, the agent and the agent’s Russian hooker-girlfriend walked to the waiting embassy car. It was a Peugeot with diplomatic plates. “We’ve got the call on the van and they’re looking for it. So why are you here?”

  “Because I’ve been lucky every step of the way,” Mike replied. The colonel was a starchy regular Army SOB who clearly thought he was hot shit for getting such a choice assignment as military attaché to the French. Of course, the French military had sunk to such a low ebb, they’d be hard pressed to defend their country from a troop of well-trained Cub Scouts. So being a military attaché was less than impressive to Mike. “I got lucky in Russia, I got lucky in Bosnia and if this is where it’s coming, you’d better hope I get lucky here.”

  “Well, we put the word out to the French security guys that you wer
e inbound,” De’Courcy said, sighing as they got in the car. “They’re less than thrilled but willing to work with us. What are you planning on doing?”

  “The events are tomorrow, right?”

  “Yeah,” De’Courcy said. “The audience is at noon and the high mass is at four PM. Then he goes on to Berlin. That’s closer to Bosnia, I might add.”

  “I know that much geography,” Mark replied dryly. “But the longer this item is in play, the more likely we are to pick it up. And if they didn’t know we were tracking, they do now with the way that IFOR took down the warehouse; that stood out like a sore thumb. I’m surprised it’s not all over the news.”

  “There was a squib about it,” De’Courcy said. “We covered it with a suspected bomb-making facility.”

  “Like that’s going to hold with NEST running around in coveralls that say NEST,” Mike said irritably. He thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Where’s this stadium?”

  “Southwest of Paris, out in the suburbs,” De’Courcy replied, pulling a map out of his briefcase. “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere away from the stadium,” Mike said. “And away from Notre Dame. Northeast of Paris is there a good hotel?”

  “There’s a Hilton up there,” De’Courcy said. “Will that do?”

  “I dunno,” Mike said. “Is it outside the radius of a ten-megaton blast?”

  De’Courcy shot a look at the girl and his jaw worked, but he nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Suits,” Mike answered. “Leave the map, give me some contact info and I’ll cut you loose. Where do you want to be dropped? I take it I can keep the car and driver?”

  “At the embassy,” De’Courcy said grumpily. “It’s going to be an all-nighter. And, yeah, the car’s yours.”

  * * *

  Mike checked into the Hilton, taking a suite that he insisted be on the north side, and led Magdelena upstairs. They attracted looks from the late-night staff, especially since he was pretty travel-worn and both of them were carrying single bags, but he could care less about the looks.