The nervous man not on the phone whispered, “What do we do?”
“Hold them off while I speak to the world.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
The man on the phone reached under his chair and produced a MAC 5 machine gun. “Distract them for only a minute more.”
“They will kill me!”
“We will all die if they continue this research. Now go; I am sure I will be right behind you.”
“Is there no other way?”
“Be brave. Give me a minute more.”
The shaky hands of the man about to take on the US Marines fiddled with the latch and pushed through the flimsy metal door. He screamed as he opened fire, spraying bullets toward everything that moved.
∞§∞
“Dr. Hiccock, I have an after-action report from Perimeter Squad Two.”
“Who is this?”
“Sergeant Holmes. We just engaged an individual who attacked us with a machine gun. We lost a man in the fight. Three wounded. However, there was another man in a trailer. As near as we can tell he caught a round in the right temple as he was attempting a call. I think he was calling CNN.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I picked up the phone and CNN was on hold. A man answered and said, ‘National Desk.’”
“Did you say anything?”
“No, sir. I hung up.”
“Good work, Sergeant. I am sorry about your man. Where are you now?”
“By the north ridge line.”
Bill turned to the leader of the men in the room. “Captain, I need to get out there.”
“Sir, you are a civilian…”
“Hold up; I am an SES 14, which is the simulated rank of major general, Captain. This is a matter of national security and I am the ranking national security officer on the scene.”
Five minutes later, a Humvee carrying Bill and two armed Marines pulled up to the trailer as a military ambulance evacuated the wounded. The body was being covered with a blanket by the medics. Bill was shocked and saddened to see them cover Corporal Bradley, the soldier who had brought the pony for Richie. Bill closed his eyes and thought of man’s little boy and how much Bradley loved him. Fear suddenly arose from Bill’s inside. He had been in tough situations before and he’d reluctantly seen a lot of action. Before he was a father he had almost bought the farm on a few occasions, but this was the first time he felt like he had skin in the game. He now sensed a hesitation and an anxiety about even being out here so soon after gunplay. Richard Ross Hiccock wasn’t going to grow up without a dad. Then he thought about Bradley again. Bill found strength in Bradley’s courage and sacrifice. He breathed deeply and trudged ahead thinking, Everyone in harm’s way has a little Richie at home. You ain’t that special; now get over yourself!
Sergeant Holmes was ordering his men to fan out and search for the rocket launcher. He approached Bill. “You must be Hiccock.”
“Must have been a hell of a fight.”
“Fast and unnecessary. A good man, killed. Three wounded. Two scabs dead. I screwed up. I didn’t expect unfriendlies.”
“Sergeant, we aren’t in Fallujah. This is the Maryland countryside; who would expect…”
“He came out blasting.”
“Sergeant. Not your fault; now where’s the other guy?”
“In the trailer, sir.
Bill entered the trailer and was shocked. It wasn’t the dead body with the blood pooled under its head. It was what the body was wearing — a priest’s collar.
“Don’t touch anything,” a voice said.
Bill turned around and saw a man in a suit holding a badge. “Barkley, Naval Criminal Investigations. I am impounding this crime scene.”
“Bill Hiccock, White House. We need to find out who this guy is working with and if there are more of them out there ready to attack other installations.”
“The Secret Service has every sensitive spot in lockdown by now.”
“I am not talking about government. These guys want to attack science.”
“Wanna run that by me again?”
“This attack was based on their objection to scientific policy. As egg-headed as that might sound, they shot down one of the president’s helicopters to kill a scientist. What else are they prepared to do, where else are they planning to hit or hitting right now?” Bill’s face turned to stone as a thought locked up his entire central nervous system. He blurted, “I gotta go.”
Bill ran to the Humvee. “Sergeant, I need to get back to the house quick.”
Bill jumped into the Humvee, which sped back to the main house. Bill jumped out, ran inside and fired-up the SCIAD computer. He typed as fast as he could…
Warning, all SCIAD members and your institutions. Probability of an attack on science and/or technology properties: high. Take measures to protect yourselves, your work and your families. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.
He was just about to hit Send when he thought again. The president wanted this contained. He deleted the messages to the outer rings and only included the top secret cleared inner ring. He added the words TOP SECRET to the message line and added the word “Quietly” in front of “take measures to protect…”
Then he ran back to the communications center. The Marine outside challenged him for ID and then the big fifty-ton door swung open.
“Get me the president.” He kissed Janice and patted Richie’s head.
“Air Force One on line two.”
“Mr. Pres…I’ll hold.” He turned to Richie, “You rode very well today, son. I bet you could be a cowboy. We are going to be riding a lot more this summer … Mr. President. Sir, I believe you should quietly raise the threat level to all government science and technology installations. We may have found the attackers and they might be fringe religious groups. I’ll have a report drawn up and to you within the hour. Yes sir, I’d like to err on the side of caution. I will, sir.”
He hung up and turned to the communications officer. “Get me the director of the FBI and use the words ‘Quarterback priority’.” He spun around to the leader. “Captain, I need to know what the fellow from Navy CIS finds out as soon as he has any information, especially who the shooters were and if they found any more of them. Same for your perimeter patrols. If they find that launch tube I want it tracked and identified stat.”
∞§∞
“Put it in the power rotation and get me Graphics. Tell Henson I want a four-second theme music cue for the bumper. I want four staff writers on this now. Who was this professor guy and see if there is an angle on budget cuts affecting helicopter maintenance? Oh, and get me the safety records for this kind of chopper. Get to it, people.” The CNN national desk editor hung up the phone on the inter-office conference call and looked up at a staff researcher. “What?”
“I overheard the call that came in claiming it wasn’t an accident.”
“Whoever it was hung up; probably some nut case. We’ve gotten twenty-five calls already, claiming everything from the Tea Party to aliens. Why are you standing around? See if the pilots had any drinking or drug issues.” He pulled out the budget to see how he could pay for all the stuff he had just ordered, and mumbled to himself, “Why does a story this good have to happen on a Saturday when the A-Teams are off?”
∞§∞
“… Aviation Captain Jesse Higgins and Warrant Officer Peter Klug. The sole passenger, Doctor Roland Landau, was also pronounced dead at the scene. The next of kin have…”
The Architect put down the science journal he was engrossed in and reached for the remote, not believing what he had just heard from the Swiss National news that was on as background noise. He rewound the DVR feature on his hotel room’s TV and replayed the entire White House helicopter crash news conference that had broken, unbeknownst to him, an hour and a half before.
He was stunned. He had been monitoring Landau and twenty other particle physicists and scientists for a year. Once Landau got his grant from LHC, he t
urned up his surveillance by having the professor’s house electronically bugged, as well as his computer at the school. It paid off. As soon as the Landau Protocols were being considered, he had the opportunity he had prayed for. It was an odd twist of faith that this man, his main source, died in an accident.
The Architect immediately assessed the damage. He concluded, that the professor’s death didn’t impact his master plan, because he had already gotten the most crucial strategic information from him: the exact day and time of the event.
∞§∞
Cheryl was driven to Camp David by uniformed Secret Service. Five more of Hiccock’s staff were scheduled to arrive within the half-hour. The president and Bill both decided to let Bill run the operation from Camp David, away from the press and the limelight. Cheryl entered, gave Janice a kiss, and then kissed little Richie, who was playing with a toy truck on the conference room table.
Bill was on the secure teleconference. Cheryl immediately recognized the face of the director of the FBI on the screen. Bill seemed to be just finishing up. “That’s why I want a separate task force, and the president and I agree to run the whole op from here, away from the White House. If this leaks out, there could be world-wide panic and chaos.”
“Okay Bill. Neil Cutter, my assistant director, will coordinate.” The head of the bureau paused, and when he spoke again his tone had changed, “Bill, is this God Particle thing real? I mean, are they fooling around with the apocalypse?”
Bill was taken aback by the question. He decided he should recalibrate his thinking on the impact of this, if even the notion gave the director of the FBI the chills. “Director, so far, and until I see proof, this all remains in the realm of particle theory, a speculation on the standard model. But the existence of this particle, or Higgs’ Boson for that matter, is purely an assumption which may be only one of many possible explanations for why everything holds together.”
“Some day when there’s time…”
“Yeah, we’ll go over the nuclear physics involved. Let’s talk again at six?”
Both screens shifted to the Camp David logo. Bill jotted some notes on his iPad, then turned and saw Cheryl. “Good, you’re here. Sorry to blow your weekend. Get me Kronos fast!”
“Kronos,” was the self-adopted name for Vincent DeMayo, a former hacker for the mob whom Bill had sprung from Elmira prison by presidential pardon during the Eighth Day Affair. His digital genius with computers had helped Bill thwart the greatest cyber-attack on American soil and saved millions of lives.
Cheryl burrowed in right away. She commandeered an area of the room and started logging in and moving phones, and somehow found a headset. She had it on and was calling Kronos as she synced her Blackberry to the system in front of her. Between her laptop and Blackberry she brought the entire operation with her. Then Bill recalled he had ‘stolen’ her from the White House chief of staff . She knew this place and the drill. She turned to Bill and said, “Kronos on c.o. four.”
Bill looked at his phone for anything with a number four.
“The flashing light, boss,” Cheryl gently said.
“Kronos. I need you to do something extremely important.”
Kronos was at a skate park with a helmet on and a skateboard under his arm. He was definitely the oldest guy there, and in the opinion of many, a ‘cool coot,’ a local skater term for, ‘old guy whose skills are pretty decent.’
“Is this legal?”
“A, since when have you ever cared about that, and, B, I don’t know, but it’s going to be covered under a presidential directive in five minutes. It will authorize us to sweep something from the Web. We need it not to have ever existed and I need it gone yesterday.”
“No big whoop, as long as it hasn’t been hash-tagged yet.”
“I’ll make believe I know what you just said and assume you will do this. When you get to your computer, Cheryl will fill you in.”
“Hey Bill, everything okay? You sound tense, man.”
“Nah, I am having a relaxing day in the country.”
XIII. SIRROCO: THE DESERT WIND
The good shepherd Bridgestone took in the routine of the prisoners through two days of observation. He was able to identify the leader of the captives by his taking charge of the exercises. The next step was easy. All the captives were Asian. All the guards were African. He had counted seven guards. During the exercise periods, all the prisoners were together and the guards all neatly at the perimeter and very visible. Although he could have called in a small squad of SEALs from a carrier strike group one hundred twenty nautical miles off, instead he went to his pickup and dragged the manure covered top plate off. He took out a Gepard GM6 .50 caliber, heavy sniper rifle. He’d have to spot the targets himself, but the distance, terrain, direction of wind, and the towels he’d wrap around the barrel would ensure that the last guard to die wouldn’t have heard the previous six shots. ‘One shot one kill’ was the sniper’s motto, more because of the exposure of his position that a second shot would bring than any concern about ammunition.
Soon the morning exercises would begin. He used the uplink radio to notify the carrier to spin up the rescue choppers. He figured five Stallions could handle the head count. They were forty-five minutes out. That should be more than enough time.
∞§∞
Captain Kasogi roused his men, giving them their five-minute heads-up before the morning exercise routine. The early chill was burning off, on its way to being a scorcher of a day here in the desert. He had noticed that the supply truck, which came every three days, never showed yesterday. That meant little or no food for his men today. To that end he would cut the exercise time in half. The little award system he initiated, which the men were now calling The Captain’s Table, had about half the crew competing to earn the “culinary” prize by crisply doing their exercises and showing camaraderie.
As the men assembled in the middle of the ramshackle camp, the guards took positions around the group. Kasogi smiled as he addressed his men, “Later today, our resident poet, Yosi, has written a poem and he will honor us with a reading of his fine work. I hear this one has a very steamy verse about a woman of questionable choices.”
The men responded in half-hearted laughter. Kasogi was happy that he had Yosi. His men of the sea were not prone to poetry, but in this God-forsaken place it gave them a point of distraction, a trace of normalcy. Kasogi knew that the captors would win if his men surrendered their spirit. The guards seemed unfazed by his strategy, possibly not understanding its true value. If rescue — when rescue came, or an escape opportunity presented itself, the window of success would be narrow. Men who were fit and spirited, men who had not succumbed to their captors, stood the greatest chance of survival.
Kasogi stretched out his arms. “Okay, we start with fifty jumping jacks. Ready, begin.”
Suddenly there was gunfire. All the men hit the ground covering their heads. From the dirt, Kasogi tried to see what was happening. The head guard was laughing, lowering his gun from shooting in the air as he walked over to Kasogi and said in half-baked French, “No exercise! We unload truck!” Kasogi stood and saw the plume of dust heading toward camp. The food truck, which was supposed to have arrived yesterday afternoon, was finally coming. Kasogi addressed his men, “It’s okay, the truck is coming to be unloaded. We’ll exercise this evening.”
∞§∞
It really sucks when your plan goes to hell, Bridgestone thought, as he keyed his radio. “Kingmaker, this is Sirocco, abort, abort. Target parameters have changed. Will update.” The satellite radio hit the sand with the force of frustration. He watched the truck approach through his sniper scope. He watched for thirty minutes as the prisoners unloaded the truck; then something bad happened.
Yosi, the radioman/poet, was heaving an extra-heavy crate onto his slight frame when he became unbalanced and the crate smashed onto the floor. Unfortunately, it was the guards’ eggs and only a few survived. The sight of “the good food” in ruins on the dirt ma
de one guard lash out, and he struck Yosi in the face with the butt of his rifle. Yosi’s bloody teeth immediately splattered on the egg-covered ground as he went down. An oiler from the engine room, a huge hulk of a man, hammered the guard with a punch from his fist and Kasogi heard the guard’s jaw snap. For his effort, the oiler was immediately perforated with several bullets, which he absorbed with groans and gasps until his body hit the ground with a thud. All the prisoners scrambled and the guards started screaming. One of Kasogi’s men was shot in the back when a guard decided he was running too far away.
Through his scope, Bridgestone could see the guards were all pointing their weapons toward the prisoners. Starting with the ones at the perimeter, he squeezed the trigger and the head of a guard popped and fell back. Next target, a full chest hit; next shot, center mass — a huge exit wound visible as the impact spun the man around; three rounds, three seconds, three down. He then trained his weapon on a guard beating a prisoner and caught him in the right eye just as he was about to smash in the skull of the prisoner.
∞§∞
Kasogi saw the guard go down. His confusion lasted a few seconds as he looked around and saw through the melee that four guards were lying dead. Someone is shooting them. From where? He quickly decided it didn’t matter; this was the moment. He ran toward the nearest dead guard and picked up his rifle. He aimed it at the first guard he saw and let out a burst that rippled across the man’s chest. He turned and found the next guard. He fired and missed and the guard turned…
∞§∞
Bridge could see the prisoners were starting to fight back and he realized the leader was now shooting as well. He saw the man miss and get the attention of his target. Bridge quickly re-aimed and fired, but the guard was spinning and Bridge’s round only glanced his shoulder.
The God Particle Page 16
