He cleared his throat again. She knew he was getting to something.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ she said.
‘Cecilia has plans. Beyond this. Beyond the Seraphim transmitters. I mean,’ he drummed the steering wheel, searching for the words, ‘they work hand in hand, but this is just one part of the advanced warfighter program. Her advanced warfighter program now.’
Sophia wet her lips. ‘What is she doing? I want to know.’
‘No, you don’t, trust me. She’s bypassing the whole operating system thing that Adamicz developed. Completely. She’s just shutting it off.’
‘Shutting what off?’ Sophia said. ‘What are these—zombie soldiers?’
Denton laughed. ‘No. She calls it the anti-Chimera vector. She proposed it to me not long before she pulled her disappearing act a couple of years back. Our soldiers had physical armor; she suggested a mental armor.’
‘She wants to switch off their … conscience?’ Sophia asked.
‘Short-circuit it,’ Denton said, ‘so it may as well not exist. Right now she’s flipped the switch on three battalions, and one of them is stationed at the OpCenter itself.’
‘Flipped a switch,’ Sophia said. She thought of Grace questioning Schlosser in the Philippines.
‘There’s a failsafe though,’ Denton said. ‘This is Cecilia we’re talking about. This bitch has an escape hatch for everything. That’s her strength, but—’
‘Also her weakness,’ Sophia said. ‘What does it do?’
‘It’s a kill switch. She developed it during the shocktrooper program. You can fire off the coded signal using a Seraphim transmitter. It’s not just for altering your moods. It can switch on a gene. A suicide gene. One that codes for deadly amino acid primes or something like that. Switch it on and your number’s up.’
‘And she can do this to all of these soldiers?’ Sophia said.
‘All of these soldiers and shocktroopers.’
‘Holy shit.’
Denton grinned. ‘You’re thinking of hitting the switch, aren’t you?’
‘That would be committing mass murder,’ Sophia said. She eyed him carefully. ‘Again.’
‘At least this time it would be your call. You’ve said it yourself before. Psychopaths aren’t human. These soldiers are psychopaths. It is a permanent and inseparable condition.’
‘But this is different,’ Sophia said. ‘They were human, once.’
Denton shrugged. ‘So are zombies. If they were real. In a zombie invasion, you’d be the first to pop a few heads.’
From the corner of her vision, she saw Denton smile at his own analogy. She ignored it. ‘Why is Cecilia doing this?’ she said. ‘What’s her endgame?’
His smile faded. ‘Cecilia needs soldiers without guilt or regret because that’s the only kind of soldier who would consider turning on their own people, their own country.’
‘And the Seraphim is for what? Fun and games?’
‘No,’ Denton said. ‘I’m sure Cecilia has many things in mind for the super-array. Fear. Anger. Fomenting civil unrest so the Fifth Column can clamp down harder. One step closer. Makes life a little easier for people in her line of work.’
She noticed his hands tighten over the steering wheel. It had been his line of work once.
‘So it’s all about tightening the bolts?’ she said. ‘One step closer to what?’
Denton focused on the road ahead. ‘Horrible things.’
Chapter Fifty
Sophia, Denton, Nasira, DC and Chickenhead were gathered around the planning table examining Denton’s sketches of the OpCenter. She looked up to see Damien and Jay enter the room. She was relieved to see them, but they weren’t alone.
‘You’ve made a few new friends,’ she said.
‘There’s thirty-seven of us now,’ Damien said.
‘That’s quite a few.’ There were only three unexpected people standing before her right now, though, and one of them was Grace.
‘Didn’t expect to see you here,’ Sophia said.
‘Likewise,’ Grace said.
‘I thought you had other things to do.’
‘This is my other thing,’ Grace said. ‘I thought you were trying to stay out of America.’
‘Staying out of trouble was never my strong point,’ Sophia said. ‘Who are your friends?’
A woman with flame-red hair gave an awkward smile and waved. ‘Hi, I’m Aviary.’
The man with them was older, probably mid-fifties. He stepped forward and gave her a sharp, almost unnoticeable nod. His posture was precise and she wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be here. His hair, closely trimmed both on his scalp and under his nose, was dense and starting to silver.
‘Colonel Abraham Harland. Retired,’ he said. ‘Your reputation precedes you.’
‘I’d say likewise, Colonel, but I don’t know who you are,’ she said.
‘You can call me Abraham. I hear you need some men to get the show on the road?’
‘Get the show on the road?’ Sophia turned to Damien and Jay. ‘At what point did you think it was a good idea to pull someone off the street to help me?’
‘We need all the help we can get,’ Damien said.
‘If it wasn’t for Abraham, we wouldn’t be here at all,’ Jay said. ‘We’d be dead or captured.’
Sophia wasn’t comfortable with new faces—strangers she barely knew, strangers who could be dangerous. The Akhana had been destroyed with much less.
‘This isn’t a war,’ she said.
‘Ma’am, this is most certainly a war,’ Abraham said. ‘I apologize if I spoke out of turn, but I don’t think you came all this way to not use everything at your disposal.’
‘Are your people trained at all?’ Sophia asked.
‘Yes,’ Abraham said. ‘And we have a handful who are especially well trained. And might I add, a surplus of firearms and ammunition.’
Sophia’s team had been running low on ammunition ever since they’d left the Philippines. The thought of a few extra mags was reassuring.
‘Why do you want to help me?’ she said.
Abraham took a smartphone from his pocket and slid it across the table. There was a video loaded onscreen. Leaving the phone on the table so everyone could see, she pressed play. It showed glimpses of riots on city streets, protesters clashing with riot police, tear gas and rocks in shop windows.
‘Another riot as thousands deluged Los Angeles this afternoon in an unexpected wave of violence. Scores of rioters have been arrested, and several police officers were reported injured as rioters fanned out across the city.’
Sophia slid the phone back to Abraham. ‘When did this happen?’
‘Just as we were coming in this morning,’ Aviary said. ‘City-wide.’
‘I’d be interested in hearing your plan,’ Abraham said to Sophia.
‘Show them what we got,’ Nasira said.
Sophia looked down at Denton’s sketches. ‘Abraham, today you’re out of retirement,’ she said, and spread the maps of Denver International Airport and the OpCenter across the table so everyone could see.
The airport design was easy to understand. Jeppesen terminal was rectangular in shape with large multilevel parking lots on each side—Garage East and Garage West. North of the terminal were three horizontal bars, each one a long concourse. Concourse A was linked to the terminal via a two-level skywalk. Concourses B and C were connected through an underground automated transit system.
Sophia’s fingers traced the lines on Denton’s sketches. ‘Right here is a corridor we can use to reach the service tunnel and the blast door. Beyond the blast door is the access tunnel. It runs for just under a mile and connects with the north and south tunnels. We take the south tunnel to the OpCenter main chambers and support area, and from there we detonate improvised EMP devices to disable and destroy the Seraphim super-array.’
‘That’s one heck of a plan,’ Abraham said.
Sophia pointed to Garage West. ‘We come in here with De
nton’s transient electromagnetic device concealed inside a van. Abraham, if you want to help, you could deploy your men into both garages and provide protection and eyes on the area.’
Abraham remained silent but was still listening.
Sophia pointed to a structure below the Jeppesen terminal. ‘There’s a hotel under construction here. It’s almost complete, so if you need to relocate and fortify your position this is the place to do it.’
‘Wouldn’t that be unnecessary given my men are on babysitting duty for the EMP?’ Abraham said. ‘An EMP that after detonation will be of no further use to us.’
‘You’re only babysitting the EMP until detonation. Post-detonation, you’re in charge of locking down the airport, which by then will be evacuating because DC will be telling the security and police to do exactly that,’ Sophia said. ‘With the airport’s security surveillance toast, you’ll need to do this with actual eyes on the ground. And on the perimeter. We need to know if anyone tries to sneak in.’
‘Which hopefully won’t happen if your man here,’ Denton gestured to DC, ‘can keep the Denver police and FBI busy.’
‘What about the airport itself?’ Damien said. ‘How do we get into the transit tunnel?’
‘We storm the place?’ Jay said, hopeful.
Sophia shook her head. ‘We’ll need an infiltration team, an advance team, an EMP team, a hostage team and a decoy team. Five teams. Abraham, can I use some of your men for the decoy team?’
‘Under the condition they are not placed in unnecessary danger,’ Abraham said.
Denton’s hands hit the table. For a moment, Sophia thought he’d lost it. But when he spoke he sounded more exasperated than enraged. ‘Nothing about this is unnecessary. I’d like to make that very clear.’
‘A sweeping generalization doesn’t inspire confidence about my men’s survivability,’ Abraham said.
‘And the Seraphim super-array does?’ Nasira said.
Abraham looked tempted to fire something back, but he bit his lip.
‘Cecilia will be expecting us to breach via proxy—a connected base like NORAD, or more likely Peterson Air Force base,’ Sophia said. ‘The decoy team will remotely detonate explosives inside a vehicle directly out the front of the Peterson base. Cecilia’s natural reaction will be to assume we’re trying to breach from somewhere else at the Peterson base, wherever the weakest point in the perimeter is. We use that breach to cover our … more direct entry into the OpCenter itself.’
‘This sounds high risk,’ Aviary said.
Damien, standing next to her, shrugged. ‘Hang around Sophia long enough and everything you do is high risk.’
‘The EMP team will prepare the transient electromagnetic device in Garage West, while the advance team bypasses security using police uniforms and,’ Sophia produced an Interceptor from her pocket and placed it on the table, ‘this to bypass any access-card readers you might encounter.’
‘What’s that?’ Abraham asked, arms folded.
‘It hides inside the access reader and scans every ID that goes through the reader successfully, which you can then use afterward to gain access yourself,’ Sophia said.
She was expecting Grace to be impressed by the gadget, but she hardly blinked. ‘So we’ll need to wait for someone to walk through first,’ she said. ‘And then what?’
‘The advance team’s responsibility will be to open the blast door that connects the service tunnel to the access tunnel. You will use Denton’s silicon fingerprint to open the blast door. The trick here is that the door needs to remain open during the EMP blast.’
‘Inside the entrance of every tunnel there are infrared cameras with facial recognition patterning,’ Denton said. ‘We can dress up as much as we like, but short of full-blown facial prosthetics—something we don’t have access to in the dwindling hours of the night—they will flag us as soon as we step through the blast door. And then our chances of proceeding undercover are pretty much zip.’
‘We need the EMP for two reasons,’ Sophia said. ‘One, so we’re not tagged as we walk in—’
‘Although the OpCenter might want to scan the RFIDs in our arms as we enter,’ Denton said. ‘But I have that under control.’
‘And two, as a plausible cover for any disruptions to the OpCenter before we can get inside,’ Sophia said. ‘We need to remain undiscovered at least until we breach the OpCenter.’
‘The point she’s making is that the blast door absolutely needs to be open,’ Denton said. ‘The OpCenter is externally shielded from electromagnetic blasts. If the blast door is closed during the EMP, sure, we have our plausible cover but the pulse won’t penetrate and we’ll get tagged as soon as we’re inside.’
‘Plus, if the EMP hits while the blast door is closed then it’s toast, and nothing short of an anti-tank missile will reopen it,’ Sophia added. ‘And we don’t have anti-tank missiles.’
Denton frowned. ‘I can’t get them for you either, not in our timeframe. Even I have my limits.’
‘Amazingly,’ Sophia said flatly. ‘Having this door open during the blast is critical to our operation.’
‘That sounds kind of tricky,’ Damien said.
‘The trick comes in doing so while not being detected by the infrared camera and the motion sensors,’ Sophia said. ‘The cameras on the exterior don’t have facial recognition but they can see you, even in infrared.’
‘EMP grenade would do the trick,’ Jay said. ‘Do we have any of those?’
‘I have one,’ Chickenhead said.
‘I have two,’ Grace added.
‘Won’t that arouse suspicion?’ Abraham said.
‘It will if it’s not used at the same time as the EMP blast,’ Sophia said. ‘And that will detract from our decoy at Peterson. This is why I need you on the advance team, Grace.’
Grace barely reacted. ‘Is there any particular reason?’
‘You have the chameleon suit, and you can cloak yourself if the need arises,’ Sophia said.
‘There’s an infrared camera and motion detector just outside the blast door,’ Denton said.
‘You can use windscreen protectors and black material,’ Aviary said. ‘Like we did in New York.’
‘But you can’t cloak the material from the infrared camera,’ DC said. ‘They’ll see you walking toward them with your improvised shield and wonder what the hell you’re doing.’
‘Get a cheap laser pointer and you can temporarily dazzle them,’ Damien said. ‘Enough to sneak through.’
‘And you set off the motion detector while you’re at it,’ Nasira said. ‘Whether you’re cloaked or you ain’t cloaked, the infrared camera will see your ass a mile off.’
‘That’s why the advance team will have four members,’ Sophia said. ‘You need to look like you belong. Grace’s chameleon suit is there in case we need it. Hopefully we won’t.’
‘The corridor that leads to the service tunnel has no surveillance,’ Denton said. ‘This is where you change into your Blue Beret uniforms. Which is really just black cams, vests, helmets, boots—you can wear everything under your police uniforms.’ Denton turned to Grace. ‘Your chameleon suits works underneath other clothing, correct?’
‘As long as the layers are thin enough, it will cloak everything,’ Grace said.
‘What about weapons?’ Jay said. ‘Won’t the advance team look a little out of place if they’re unarmed?’
Sophia gave him a nod. ‘You’ll have your Blue Beret specific weapons all in one bag.’
‘Tactical vests and Blue Beret-issue Magpul PDRs,’ Denton said.
Sophia had seen the PDRs in Denton’s van. They looked a lot like the FN P90 personal defense weapons she’d used at Desecheo Island, except that unlike most personal defense weapons the PDR was, as the acronym said, a rifle. It was capable of firing standard 5.56 NATO rounds and offered the same range and fire rate as an M4 carbine. The PDR was a futuristic-looking, gas-operated bullpup and the Fifth Column had issued them to Blue Beret securit
y attachments in 2012, with RFID readers implanted in the handgrips so only authorized personnel could operate them.
‘I grabbed a few from the substation,’ Denton said. ‘Problem is, they’re fingerprint-activated and you need to program them to particular fingerprints on-site, so you won’t actually be able to fire these.’
Abraham was shaking his head. ‘This operation is hinging on quite a few long shots, and you want the advance team to go in with weapons that won’t even fire?’
‘After the EMP, no one inside that service tunnel will be able to fire,’ Sophia said. ‘The RFID chips will be fried. And we will have pistols. Unlike the Blue Berets, our pistols won’t have RFID chips.’
‘And inside the OpCenter?’ Abraham asked. ‘Will they be fried there?’
‘The EMP won’t penetrate that far,’ Sophia said. ‘We’ll have to go in ourselves and locally destroy the Seraphim super-array and the control station.’
Jay whistled. ‘That’s some operation.’
‘There are patrols in that tunnel every four hours,’ Denton said. ‘Four Blue Berets. You’ll need to steer clear of them so you don’t have any awkward confrontations.’
‘Open the blast door, act as though you intend to walk through, and at the moment we detonate the EMP, freeze the blast door in place,’ Sophia said. ‘Once that happens, all you need to do is keep your Blue Beret gear on and wait for the infiltration team to arrive. Stay out of sight of any patrol, but take them out if need be. All the sensors in your end of the access tunnel will be toast so no one will be able to see what you’re doing.’
‘Who’s on the advance team?’ Damien said.
‘Grace is on the advance team. I’ll need you and Jay at the terminal with me,’ Sophia said. ‘We’ll be the infiltration team. Both the advance and infiltration teams will breach the OpCenter. Anyone with minimal field training, I suggest you sit this one out. If you’re uncomfortable with what I’m proposing then you should also sit this one out.’
‘I don’t think anyone’s comfortable with that,’ Jay said.
The Seraphim Sequence: The Fifth Column 2 Page 42
