by Tom Clancy
“You know, Mike, tactics are easier when the objectives are clear, when you know what hill or town you have to take and what resources are available to do it. Politics is a war without rules of engagement or the immediacy of gun-fire. Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve been hit until days later or until you read it in the newspaper.”
“I guess I should be grateful my executioner looked me in the eyes when he pulled the trigger,” Rodgers replied.
“I did not say that,” Hood insisted.
“Then I’m confused,” Rodgers told him. “Are we talking specifically about us or are we having a philosophical discussion about what my grandfather used to call ‘follytics’?”
“I’m trying to apologize,” Hood said.
“For what? Firing me? Placing my new boss under a magnifying glass?”
“Neither. We’ve been over those. I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do about any of it.”
Rodgers buckled the first bag. Before he loaded the second, he regarded Hood. “That’s another difference between soldiers and politicians,” he said. “No can do is not in our vocabulary. Neither is surrender.”
“That may be,” Hood said. Now there was a bit of steel in his voice. “I’ll tell you this, though, Mike. If I had made a stand on these points that obviously offend your sense of honor, the battlefield would be hip deep with corpses. And I still would have lost the battle.” Hood extended his hand. “I won’t be offended if you don’t shake it. I’ll only be sad.”
Rodgers had not yet started loading the second bag. He began putting the keepsakes inside.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You mean you won’t,” Hood said.
Rodgers snickered. “Politicians play with words, too.” He held up his right palm. “I mean this hand just took down a photograph of a man who gave his life for this place. It can’t, and won’t, clasp the hand of a guy who was afraid to lose his job. And by the way, Paul. A battlefield littered with war dead is not the same as a job market having to absorb some bureaucrats. Don’t ever compare them.”
“I wasn’t,” Hood said. “I was only trying to connect with you somehow.”
“Well, you failed.”
“I can see that.” Hood lowered his arm. “If you change your mind, the hand is still extended.”
“I appreciate that.”
“And I do wish you well,” Hood added.
“I appreciate that, too,” Rodgers said with a little more formality.
Hood left, shutting the door behind him. Rodgers looked around. The office seemed both bigger and smaller because of the naked walls. Men are small, but their deeds are large.
Rodgers did not regret what he had just done. Unlike Hood, he did not even feel sad. All he felt was a sense of pride that he had lifted himself from the battlefield and soldiered on. He finished packing the second bag, then went to his desk and removed the few personal items that were still there. A leather bookmark with the NATO logo, a letter opener from the king of Spain in gratitude for the way Striker had helped prevent a new civil war.
A memorial card from the service of Bass Moore, the first Striker killed in action.
Rodgers was convinced that he had done the right thing by rejecting Hood’s hand. As he left his former office, the general was convinced of something else. That there was probably nothing on God’s sweet earth that would ever make him rescind that decision.
THIRTY
Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, 2:18 P.M.
Though the military police would never acknowledge it, security was rooted in the two Ps: preparedness and profiling. It had to be done that way. The kids manning the gates and checkpoints at bases around the world lacked street smarts and experience. They required checklists.
Jacquie Colmer did not fit any of the terrorist profiles. She was fair-skinned, and she was a woman. That eliminated religious extremists and white supremacists. She was also disarming. She smiled a great deal, which terrorists tended not to do. Most were anxious young amateurs, fearful of being captured and disappointing their sponsors. Jacquie was not a novice. The key to successful penetration of an enemy target was what Jacquie had always called the seduction factor. Her job was not to muscle people into submission but to coerce them. She used femininity, compliments, small talk, and invigorating observations to make herself welcome. “Look at that sky!” she would say, or “Smell that rain!” She drew attention to the moment to hide what lay beyond.
While the Herndon Road Services Company was not the usual Country-Fresh Water Corporation vehicle, she had the proper documentation. The Andrews Air Force Base guard went through the antiespionage checklist, which he knew by heart. There were only containers of water in the back, and the front-to-back mirror view of the underside revealed nothing. The young, expressionless guard looked under the hood with a flashlight. He saw only the engine.
Jacquie was allowed to drive on.
The woman parked her van away from the sight line of the base sentry. She withdrew a hefty five-gallon container and hoisted it onto her right shoulder. She saw through the tinted glass that the guard booth inside the lobby was on the left side. She had made it this far. The guard by the elevator at the National Crisis Management Center would not give her much trouble. Especially a woman holding a large plastic bottle of water. A bottle that was tinted deep blue to make the water appealing.
And to hide what was in the neck of the bottle. What the tint did not conceal, Jacquie’s glove and the bottle’s neck did.
The sentry was a husky woman who held the rank of corporal. Her name tag said Vosa.
“Corporal Vosa, did you know that water coolers consume four billion kilowatt hours a year, which produces an annual level of pollution equivalent to the emissions of three-quarters of a million cars?” she asked the guard.
“I did not, ma’am,” said the NCO.
Playing the nerd was also a useful tactic when one wished to get in and out of a place quickly. No one liked to talk to a chatterbox. They liked it less when they were addressed by name. It made the individual feel as though their privacy had been invaded even more.
The guard checked her papers quickly.
“It says here you have a delivery of eleven bottles,” the corporal said. “You only have one.”
“With me, right now,” Jacquie replied. “The cart only holds ten. I figured I would take this one first, then go back for the rest. Easy before hard, that’s my motto.”
The guard called down to Mac McCallie in Ed Colahan’s office. The CFO’s group was in charge of supplies and the scheduling of deliveries. McCallie informed the guard that CFWC was indeed expected. The sentry used the remote keypad at her station to summon the elevator.
“That four billion kilowatt hours a year is three hundred million dollars worth of utility bills,” Jacquie added. “You ought to mention that to your superiors. Not that I want to see these guys lose business, but I’m a taxpayer, too. Maybe we can help cut the military budget by eliminating water coolers.”
“It’s a thought, ma’am,” the guard said charitably. She wrote out a pass and handed it to Jacquie. The delivery woman slapped the sticky ID on her Herndon Road Services delivery uniform.
The elevator door opened. Jacquie saluted casually with her left hand and walked on. “See you in a few minutes,” Jacquie said.
The elevator took the woman downstairs, where she was met by McCallie. A former marine, judging from his posture. No one stood as straight and tight as the semper fi boys. He also offered to carry the bottle, another giveaway. She declined. He took Jacquie to the water cooler and stayed with her the entire time. She put the bottle beside the cooler, then went to go and get the other ten.
Which, of course, she would not be doing.
Jacquie went to the van. She drove away, waving to the guard as she left. He would not know she had failed to complete the delivery.
As she drove away, Jacquie pulled off the blond wig she was wearing. She allowed her long black hair to ca
scade out. In less than one minute a wristwatch-size timer inside the bottle cap would activate the flux compression generator that Art Van Wezel had placed in the long bottleneck. The FCG consisted of a tube stuffed with explosives inside a slightly larger copper coil. The coil would be energized by a bank of capacitors, creating a magnetic field. Five seconds later, the timer would detonate the explosives. As the tube flared outward, it would touch the coil and create a short circuit. The short circuit would cause the magnetic field to compress while reducing the inductance of the coil. The result would be an electric shock that broke free as the device self-destructed. The shock would only last a few microseconds, but it would produce a current of tens of millions of amperes.
The resultant electromagnetic pulse would make a lightning bolt seem like a flashbulb by comparison. It would turn Op-Center into an electronic graveyard. The pulse would also cover her tracks for her by erasing the videotapes fed by the security cameras. The military police and FBI would be looking for a talkative blond. One with blue eyes. She popped the colored contact lenses from her eyes and put them in the pocket of her uniform.
When Jacquie was a mile from the base, she pulled over on a narrow back street off Allentown Road. She was just a quarter mile from the Capital Beltway. It was important that she get there as quickly as possible. First, though, there were several things she had to do.
Jacquie slipped the water company signs from the sides of the van. She replaced them with signs she pulled from under the driver’s side floor mat. They read, Interfaith Good News Mobile. She put a bow in her hair and a Bible on the passenger’s seat. She placed a different license tag on the back of the van. The police would not think to stop her. No one would.
The wind was blowing hard, and she did not hear the blast when it came. But she knew the e-bomb had gone off. The rich blue sky over Andrews Air Force Base took on a brief, magnesium-white glow. It arced low just above and through the canopy of oak trees, a man-made aurora borealis that swiftly shaded to yellow, then green, then blue again as it vanished.
Jacquie smiled as she got back into the van. She drove to the highway, careful not to exceed the speed limit. She would return the van to Herndon, then stay in her house for several days. She would say she was sick with the flu while she waited to see the police sketch of the Op-Center bomber. She would be dieting while she was home. If the sketch happened to look like her now, it would not by the time she “got better.”
Ironically, the government would benefit in one way because of what she had done.
The budget for water coolers would go way down.
THIRTY-ONE
Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, 2:37 P.M.
It sounded as though someone had popped a very large balloon. Hood’s first thought was that one of Op-Center’s emergency generators had exploded.
Paul Hood was sitting at his desk, his office door closed. He had been looking absently at the computer wallpaper, a crayon drawing of Los Angeles City Hall that Harleigh had done when she was four. He had been replaying the argument with Mike Rodgers, wondering if it could have gone differently, when he heard the burst from down the hall. It was loud enough to make him wince and to clog his ears for several seconds. A moment later the fluorescent lights above began to glow brightly. In front of Hood, the computer wallpaper was replaced by a strange, milky luminescence.
Hood rose slowly. As his ears began to clear, he heard coughing and shouts from beyond his closed door. He heard the people but nothing else. Not the hum of his computer nor the whir of the air conditioner or even the faint electric buzz of the coffee machine. Hood’s left wrist felt warm. He glanced at his watch. The LCD was blank. So was the screen on his cell phone. He removed the watch. Faint ribbons of smoke curled from the battery compartment and also from the cell phone.
“No,” Hood said. He suspected that what had hit Op-Center was not just a burned-out generator or a simple power failure.
He hurried to the door and opened it. The corridor beyond Bugs’s cubicle was filled with wispy, yellowish smoke. The air was rich with the pungent aroma of ozone mixed with the foul smell of melted plastic. He later learned that these were from charred outlet plates, electric wires, and telephone lines.
Bugs was standing in the corridor, fanning away smoke, trying to see. He looked back when Hood emerged.
“What happened?” Hood asked.
“Something blew up in the lounge, I think,” Bugs said. “I tried to call the gate to seal the perimeter, but the phones are fried.”
“Emergency power is gone?” Hood asked.
“Everything.”
“Do we know about casualties?”
“No.”
“Are you okay?” Hood asked.
“Yes.”
“Start getting people toward the stairwell,” Hood said.
“Mike is doing that,” Bugs said.
“Help him,” Hood said.
“Sure,” Bugs said. “Be careful.”
Rodgers and Ron Plummer were the heads of the emergency evac team. The thought of them working together did not fill him with hope but with pride and respect. Differences among Americans always vanished when it mattered.
Hood gave Bugs a reassuring pat on the back just as Matt Stoll appeared from the mist. He was heading in the direction of the blast. Hood went with him.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Hood asked.
“We got kilned,” Stoll said angrily.
“Sorry?”
“Superheated. The only thing I know that could do this is an e-bomb.”
“Are you sure?” Hood asked.
“The glow of the lights, the monitors, is like a fingerprint. Nothing else could cause that.”
“Was it inside the building or out?” Hood asked.
“Inside. I stopped by the Tank, and it was fine. I left Jefferson there to call for help. He was able to raise the front gate, which means they were not affected.”
While all of Op-Center was secure, the Tank was the equivalent of an electronic fallout shelter. The conference room was protected from eavesdropping, hacking, and all manners of attack, including electromagnetic pulse. Stoll had designed it to be a large-scale Faraday cage, a hollow conductor that spread a charge along the outside of a system without producing an electric field inside. That would include a burst from an electromagnetic pulse. Ironically, Hood had believed that the only way they would be affected by an e-bomb is if an Air Force test at Andrews went sour.
Until now.
The smoke and the smell grew stronger as they neared the lounge. Stoll covered his mouth with a handkerchief, but Hood did not. The smoke was not too acrid, and he did not want to appear weak or impaired. That was important in a crisis. The men rounded a corner and entered the lounge.
The small room was clogged with yellow gray smoke. Without ventilation, it hung there, virtually impenetrable.
“Is anyone in here?” Hood shouted.
There was no answer.
“The smoke is from the explosive that triggered the EM burst,” Stoll said. The portly scientist shuffled across the tile so he did not trip over any debris. While Stoll moved deeper, he waved his left hand to help clear the smoke. “The explosion was extremely low yield.”
“How can you tell?” Hood asked. He was following behind, waving both hands and looking for victims.
“For one thing, the explosion did not have to be large to trigger the pulse. For another, I can see the base of the water cooler. The left side is gone. The bomb must have been beside it.”
Hood saw a body. He knelt and bent close. Ugly, twisted pieces of the water cooler base were lodged in the man’s chest. Blood stained his blue shirt thickly. He was not breathing.
“Who is it?” Stoll asked.
“Mac McCallie.” Hood went to where he knew the candy and soda machines were. He fanned away the smoke. The vending machines were damaged, but not badly. Hood continued to feel his way around. There were upended tables and chairs, their legs twisted
and surfaces peppered with shrapnel. From below. He felt the tops. They were spotted with blood. That meant they were still standing when McCallie was struck. Stoll was correct. The bomb was probably beside the cooler. Mac must have been here checking on the scheduled water delivery. Bloody damn government contracts like that were public information. Anyone could have gotten it. Hood took a slightly singed dishcloth from the sink and lay it gently across the dead man’s face.
“This was designed to stop us, not kill us,” Stoll said.
“Tell that to Mac,” Hood said.
“Chief, I’m sorry,” Stoll replied. “He was in the wrong place. All I’m saying is that whoever created this wanted to shut Op-Center down.”
Jefferson Jefferson appeared in the thinning smoke of the doorway. “The base has been sealed, and an emergency rescue team is on the way.”
“Thanks. Now get yourself out of here, but wait for the ERT at the top of the stairs,” Hood said. “Tell them to come here.”
“Yes, sir,” the young man replied. He remained in the doorway for a moment looking at the body on the floor.
“Go,” Hood said.
Jefferson turned and left. Hood heard his footsteps as he retreated. Except for distant voices and Matt’s strained breathing, Hood heard nothing else. Op-Center seemed as lifeless as poor Mac. It was strange. He was able to compartmentalize the death of the man. It was a terrible event, but Hood would mourn later as he had Charlie Squires, Martha Mackall, and too many others. It was much more difficult to get his brain around the idea that Op-Center was a marble-silent tomb. This facility had given his life purpose, the only direction he seemed to have. Absent that, Hood felt as dead as Mac. Except he was still breathing.
Mike would say that means there’s still hope, Hood thought. Maybe that would follow. Right now, all Hood felt was helplessness bordering on fear. He knew he had to get that under control. He had to focus.
Hood went over to Stoll. The computer scientist was squatting beside the jagged ruins of the water cooler and the adjoining debris field. Stoll had removed a penlight from his shirt pocket. He had taken it from an emergency supply kit in the Tank. He was examining the floor closely without touching anything. He looked like a boy studying an anthill.
