“I thought you’d be happy,” he said. “We don’t have to listen to the tape anymore. Why are you so upset?” She looked at him and then nodded toward the helicopter. “What’s that doing here?” Paul looked over. The payload beneath the helicopter was being lowered to the deck in a cradle. It was now close enough that Paul could make out what it was: a small submersible. Attached to the rear of the sub was a package of mechanical equipment and a human-shaped figure made of metal. Rapunzel.
“Dirk sent it over,” Paul said.
“You knew about this?”
“He told me this morning,” Paul said. “It’s only a contingency. Just in case we need it.” Gamay said nothing. She just shook her head angrily, glared at him for a second, and then pushed past him and went back inside the ship.
47
Sierra Leone, July 5
IN HIS EXECUTIVE PALACE, with its marble floors, Djemma Garand sat with Alexander Cochrane. Cochrane had spent the night reviewing the options arrived at by the ad hoc scientific guests.
“Essentially,” Cochrane said, “they’ve all come up with the same solution. I see minor differences, no more.”
Cochrane looked tired. His usual petulance had been replaced by a sense of exhaustion and perhaps fear.
“And your evaluation of their solutions?” Djemma asked, eager to get to the point.
“The fact that they all came to it independently tells me it’s probably correct. I see nothing wrong with their calculations.”
“And the implementation?” Djemma asked.
“In essence, we can use the particle accelerator as it stands now,” Cochrane said. “We just have to generate a heavier charged particle to fire through it. It’s like trading out a twenty-two shell and replacing it with a forty-five. Everything else is the same. The particles will move a little slower, not enough to affect the operation, but they’ll hit with three times the power.” He put his notes down. “It’s rather simple, actually.”
“Pity you didn’t think of it months ago,” Djemma said, the words sliding off his tongue with open disdain.
“This is theoretical work,” Cochrane said. “Not my field.”
“Yes,” Djemma said. “After all, you are just a mechanic.”
The intercom on Djemma’s phone buzzed. “Mr. President,” his secretary said, “a guest has arrived to speak with you. The American ambassador.”
“Excellent,” Djemma said. “Send him in.”
Cochrane stood. “I need twenty-four hours to make the changes.”
“Then I suggest you get to it,” Djemma said. He pointed to a back door. “Leave that way.”
Cochrane obliged, moving quickly out the back as the front door to Djemma’s office opened and the American ambassador came in. Normally, Djemma would meet such a man halfway across the floor, but he remained in his seat, beckoning the ambassador to sit across from him in the spot Cochrane had just vacated.
“President Garand,” the ambassador said in an easy Texas drawl, “I’m sure you know the sad business I’m here to ask you about.”
“Whatever do mean, Mr. Ambassador?” Djemma said. “We are celebrating our Fourth of July. A day late, perhaps.”
The ambassador managed a forced smile but shook his head. “What you’re calling independence is nothing but naked aggression, theft, and the violation of international law. To be honest with you, I can’t recall such a brazen act.”
“Then you must be a poor student of history,” Djemma said. “In 1950, under the threat of nationalizing all of Standard Oil’s assets, the Saudi royal family took half the oil in Arabia. That oil has been worth three and a half trillion dollars over the last sixty years. In 2001, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela did virtually the same thing. In 1972, Chile nationalized its copper mines under Salvador Allende. In 1973, India nationalized its entire coal industry. In 1959, Fidel Castro took Havana, waiting patiently until the Havana Hilton was complete so he could use it as the Communist Party’s headquarters. He seized all foreign assets and has never relinquished them. Do you not recall any of these events, Mr. Ambassador?”
The ambassador took a deep breath. “Of course I recall them, but this is different.”
“Yes,” Djemma said. “And just how different you have not yet discovered. In the meantime, in strict dollar terms, my actions are relatively minor in comparison to the events I have just reminded you of. To be honest, I’m surprised to see you. I would have expected the Chinese ambassador to arrive first; they stand to lose far more than you.”
The last statement was a jab at the ambassador’s pride, but he didn’t react.
“We’re here on their behalf,” he said. “And on behalf of all the countries that have a grievance and a claim. Now, off the record, we’re prepared to consider modifying the repayment terms of your loans, but we’re not forgiving you any of the principal. And before any negotiations start, your forces must withdraw from the industrial institutions owned by foreign parties.”
Djemma smiled. “I make you a counteroffer,” he said. “I will keep what we have rightly taken. And I will ask only for twenty billion a year in grants from your country.”
“What?” the ambassador said.
“I would ask for new loans,” Djemma said, “but considering that I didn’t pay the other loans back, I fear no one will extend us credit. Therefore, it will have to be grants. Do not worry, we will be demanding the same contributions from China and Europe.”
“You can’t be serious,” the ambassador responded curtly. “You steal the world’s property and then demand that we collectively give you sixty billion dollars a year in free money?”
“It is a small amount,” Djemma assured him. “You gave your own banks seven hundred billion a few years ago. You spent a trillion dollars on Iraq, twenty billion a month. What I ask for is a fraction of that, and no one has to suffer. In return, we will allow American corporations to handle many of the construction projects. You may consider it a stimulus program.”
By now Djemma was smiling like a madman. For so long he had listened to the Europeans and Americans lecturing poor nations on fiscal responsibility. Hypocrites, he thought. Look what they had wrought upon themselves. Now he would throw it back in their faces.
The ambassador’s face was turning red. “Your reach is stretching beyond your power to grasp, Mr. President,” he blurted. “This will not stand.”
“The Saudis still stand,” Djemma said. “Chávez still stands. So does Castro. You will find it easier to negotiate than you are letting on. And if you don’t… I warn you there will be consequences.”
This was the first hint of a threat that Djemma had made. He needed to be subtle. By the sudden focus on the ambassador’s face, he knew he hadn’t been too obscure. But when the ambassador began to chuckle, Djemma felt his own ire rising.
“What is so funny?” he demanded to know.
The ambassador settled down, but a smile remained on his face. “I feel like I’m in a production of The Mouse That Roared,” he said. “I could take over this country with a group of Boy Scouts and a few state troopers, and you think you can threaten us?”
The laughter returned, and Djemma snapped. He brought the riding crop down on the desk in a stunningly swift move. The ambassador jumped back at the sound, shocked.
“Your arrogance betrays you, Mr. Ambassador,” Djemma said. He stood, drawing himself up to his full six-foot-two-inch height.
“For too long you and the other rich nations have mocked countries like mine,” he said. “Whether you believe it or not, those days are about to end. The industrialized world will support us, not in dribs and drabs but in substantial amounts. You will help us stand or we will drag you down into the mire with us! Only then will you see the truth. We are not mice for you to play with. Sierra Leone is the Land of Lions. And if you are not cautious, you will feel our teeth in your soft, decadent necks.”
Djemma didn’t wait for a reply from the American ambassador. He pressed the intercom button, and a group
of guards entered the room.
“See the ambassador to the airfield,” he shouted. “He is to be deported immediately.”
“This is an outrage,” the ambassador shouted.
“Take him!” Djemma ordered.
The ambassador was hustled outside, and the door slammed behind him.
Djemma sat alone, fuming. He was angry with the ambassador’s arrogance and disdain. He hadn’t expected it so soon. But he was even angrier with himself for jumping at the bait and voicing his threat so forcefully. He hadn’t planned to speak so soon. Now there would be no negotiations. Unless…
He had no choice. He had made a claim that the Americans would assume to be a bluff. He had to demonstrate his power, otherwise they and the world at large would only scoff and laugh with disdain as he ranted and raved: another mad dictator in a banana republic.
He would unleash his weapon in all its glorious power and leave them no choice but to treat him with respect.
48
Washington, D.C., July 6, 1330 hours
DIRK PITT HAD A FRONT-ROW SEAT in the Situation Room at the Pentagon. Cameron Brinks of the NSA was putting on a show. The President wasn’t there, but his Chief of Staff, military brass from all four branches, and several members of the cabinet were present. As was the Vice President of the United States, Dirk Pitt’s former boss, Admiral James D. Sandecker.
With the bizarre actions in Sierra Leone over the past few days, followed by the threats coming from its President, Brinks had totally embraced the possibility that Sierra Leone was involved in the scientific kidnappings and the creation of some type of energy weapon.
How else could they have the gall to threaten the world and America in particular? After several days of searching with his satellites, Brinks claimed to have identified the location of such a weapon, calling it a clear and present danger.
At the front of the room, on a screen that was just a fraction smaller than some Jumbotrons he’d seen, Pitt studied a satellite feed. It showed an area off the coast of Sierra Leone, a shallow bay ten miles across, home to an oil production zone known as the Quadrangle because of its dimensions and the four evenly spaced platforms. On a wide angle they showed up as four pinpoints of gray. At closer ranges, those points were easily identifiable as huge offshore oil rigs.
Other data was being overlaid on the screen, numbers and codes that Pitt wasn’t familiar with. In some respects he wondered why he was even there. NUMA was peripherally involved in the search, but for the most part any action at this level would be well out of their hands.
With the participants given a few minutes to review the files in front of them, Dirk studied what he’d been given a second time. One thing that caught his attention was the fact that the entire field and the four rigs were owned by the government of Sierra Leone and always had been, unlike all the structures taken just days before in the sweeping nationalization.
Another red flag that stood out was the fact that oilmen the CIA had spoken with insisted there was no oil beneath the shelf where the Sierra Leone government was drilling. It was a boondoggle, they insisted. A waste of the money the IMF was pouring into the country.
Add to that the continued presence of construction barges and constant deliveries of equipment well after the construction of the platforms was completed, and something odd seemed to be going on.
Pitt closed the file in front of him and looked up to see Brinks and Vice President Sandecker walking his way. They stopped and chatted with the Navy’s chief of staff before wandering over to where Pitt sat.
Pitt stood and shook hands with both men.
“I told you your man was off on a wild-goose chase, looking for this mercenary,” Brinks said.
Pitt smiled and his green eyes showed nothing but pure joy, despite a desire to punch Brinks right in the mouth.
“I honestly hope you’re right,” Pitt said. “After all he’s been through, Austin could use a vacation.”
“Well,” Brinks said confidently, “we’re about to give him one.”
As Brinks moved off, Sandecker took a seat next to Pitt.
“Thanks for the invite,” Pitt said, sarcastically. “It’s like a pool party with sharks and alligators.”
“You think I wanted you here?” Sandecker joked. “Brinks dialed you up.”
“Why?”
“Probably wants to gloat.”
“Nothing like a sore winner,” Pitt said.
Sandecker agreed. “I hear you shot him down pretty hard the other day.”
“He was asking for it,” Pitt said.
The VP chuckled and leaned back, focusing on the screen. “I bet he was.”
Pitt appreciated Sandecker’s support. Always had. “You know it’s weird for me to see you without a cigar in your mouth,” Pitt said.
“No smoking in the Situation Room,” Sandecker replied. “Now, pipe down and you might learn something.”
Up front, Cameron Brinks stood and began his presentation. After explaining what Dirk had already discovered in the file, he went on to elaborate.
“I’ll make this as quick as I can,” he said. “We all know the situation in Sierra Leone is spiraling. What we didn’t know until now is whether there was any credence to the threats leveled against us. We now believe, based on information uncovered by various sources, that there is. As odd as it sounds, Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, is now in possession of a weapon of incredible destructive power.”
Brinks walked to the side of the room, conferring for a second with an assistant who seemed to be hooked up to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the satellite data was coming from.
“In the time since we put together the files in front of you,” Brinks said, “we’ve conducted additional satellite passes of the area described in them. The Quadrangle. The video on the screen is a real-time scan.”
Brinks looked down, waited as his assistant tapped a few keys on the computer terminal in front of him, and then raised a remote control device and pointed at the screen. With the click of a button, the colors on the screen changed. False hues illuminated the water, the land, and features that hadn’t been visible in the earlier shot.
“This is an infrared scan of the Quadrangle area,” Brinks said.
Pitt looked on. The area around each oil platform was bathed in a reddish color that elongated with the tide. It had to be a discharge of some kind, one that was raising the water temperature around the rigs and slowly being drawn off by the current. Pollution was his first thought, leaking oil or distillates of some kind, but then he remembered that there was no oil in the region.
“The rigs are pumping heated water,” he said.
Brinks nodded. “Very good, Mr. Pitt. Each one of these platforms is shipping heated water out into the Atlantic. Hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of high-temperature water every day. There can only be one reason for that: whatever they’re doing requires an immense amount of cooling.”
“They’re generating power,” Pitt whispered to Sandecker a few seconds before Brinks confirmed it.
“The question is, why?” Brinks said. “The answer is simple: to use in a massive particle accelerator that they have turned into a weapon.”
Brinks clicked his remote control, and the image changed again, adding purple to the dark blue, gray, and magenta already on the screen. The new iridescent color ran in a thin line, encircling the four oil rigs — which were, in fact, spaced miles apart — in a giant loop. Other thin fingers branched off this loop and stretched out into the Atlantic. One group went to the west and the northwest, another group north and northeast, a third group of these thin purple filaments branched back toward the African continent.
“This loop demarks an underwater structure that was identified through a combination of infrared scans and surface-penetrating radar from an Aurora spy plane. The loop is fifteen miles in diameter,” Brinks said, using a laser pointer to indicate the circle. “And each of these supposed oil rigs is just a
facade to throw us off. Beneath their structures are throbbing power plants, each large enough to light a small city.”
“What kind of power plants?” someone asked.
“Gas turbine generators, feeding off a large natural gas pipeline that was built allegedly to bring gas out of the area. We now know the opposite is true.”
“And all that power?” someone else asked.
“Used in the superconducting electromagnets that accelerate the particles,” Brinks said, “and the massive cooling system required to keep the ring at operating temperature.”
Brinks stood back and explained. “By our calculations, this system is generating and using twenty times the energy that CERN uses for its Large Hadron Collider. We can come up with only one explanation for such a power need. This thing is a weapon. It can probably take down satellites over Europe, the Atlantic, and Africa of course. It can threaten shipping in the Atlantic, perhaps as far as a hundred miles out. It can threaten commercial aircraft in a three-hundred-mile radius.”
“The weapon can only fire three hundred miles?” Pitt asked.
“No,” Brinks said. “It can probably do damage at a much farther range, perhaps even tens of thousands of miles, but it fires in a straight line like a laser. It cannot curve around the surface of the earth like a ballistic missile.”
That made sense, but something else didn’t.
“What about the Kinjara Maru?” Pitt asked. “That ship was nowhere near Sierra Leone when it was hit.”
“No,” Brinks admitted. “Probably they have a derivative weapon on that submarine we’re looking for. But that’s a tactical weapon, small potatoes. This thing is strategic and threatens an entire region. We’ll deal with this first, the submarine afterward.”
Brinks turned back to the group. “Our recommendation is that it be taken out in a surgical airstrike before Djemma can use it against someone.”
Silence followed that statement. No one disagreed, not after Djemma Garand’s actions in the days preceding and his threats, however unspecified, against the United States.
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