Oceans of Fire

by Don Pendleton

  The young woman straightened and adopted a professional tone. “I am having difficulties breaking into your hard drive.”

  Tokaido snorted and felt congealed blood move down his throat. “Of course you are.”

  “My employer wishes every bit of information on this computer. You will give it to me.”

  “Or what?”

  The redhead suddenly couldn’t meet his eyes. She was clearly uncomfortable with the situation. “I am told Mr. Forbes and Mr. Mahke will extract it for me.”

  Tokaido’s stomach clenched. He had zero doubts about that, and the fact was, Clay Forbes absolutely terrified him. The young hacker knew something else from his work on the Farm. He had heard that once you gave the enemy something during an interrogation it became easier and easier for them to extract more, like pulling bricks out of a wall until it collapsed. Then again, Forbes’s words kept ringing in his throbbing head.

  Jumper cables, blowtorches and pliers.

  Tokaido had surprised himself since his capture, but he held no doubts that any tough-guy pretenses he had left would collapse like a house of cards when Forbes began applying everything in Hardware Aisle B to his flesh and bones.

  His guts churned. The fact was, it was going to happen. No matter how much he cooperated, in the end they would butcher him up like a Thanksgiving turkey to make sure he had given up every last scrap of information. Speed was the question. They wanted him willing, so that they might learn everything they could so that they could modify their defenses.

  The fact was there was a part of himself that he had so far barely kept in check. One that it had taken every ounce of will not to give in to, and it was the one part that held any chance of anything good coming out of this situation. He thought of his family that he would never see again, and his friends at the Farm. He found he didn’t need to act. A man hanging naked and bloody in chains had little need to pretend at despair. His throat tightened and his swollen eyes stung.

  “Please…”

  Marx’s hand crept to her chest as tears spilled down Tokaido’s cheeks.

  “Don’t…don’t let Forbes hurt me anymore.”

  The woman watched in pity and revulsion as the young man begged for his life.

  “I’ll do anything you want. Please, just, no more, please, just, no more…”

  Marx rapped twice on the door. The two security men came in and one of them unlocked Tokaido’s manacles. He collapsed to the metal floor and clutched himself in a fetal ball. Shame and terror racked him. The security men pulled over a little metal folding table and a chair, and shoved him in it. Marx placed his laptop in front of him and then set a second one beside it.

  “First you will download a copy of your hard drive into my computer.” She connected the two laptops together and powered them up. “Do not do anything foolish.”

  Tokaido brought his bruised, torn and trembling hands to his keyboard. He wasn’t connected to the Internet. The two guards looming behind him would beat him into paste if he tried to contact the outside world. The only thing he had was his connection with Marx’s laptop.

  His laptop was a creature of his own design. It looked like a normal laptop the same way Dragonslayer could appear to be a normal civilian helicopter, and in its own way was every bit as dangerous. His laptop had been in communication with Franka Marx for a few moments back in Berlin. He brought up a window and began typing in code.

  Marx’s eyes narrowed at the few sparse lines of letters, numbers and symbols. “What are you doing?”

  One of the guards clamped a hand on Tokaido’s shoulder.

  He flinched and stopped. “I’m typing in the access codes.”

  Marx scanned the screen again. “You are lying.”

  There was no time to finish. It would have to do. Tokaido’s hands flicked out and he punched Return.

  The guard yanked him backward out of his seat by the hair and hurled him to the floor. Inside of Tokaido’s laptop there was a distinct tick and hiss noise. Marx gave a little shriek as the one-half ounce of plastic explosive buried in the hard drive snapped like a firecracker as the battery pulsed electrically and detonated it. Number and letter keys flew up from the keyboard and the high-definition screen went black. Wisps of smoke oozed out of the firewire and USB ports.

  Tokaido summoned the last vestige of his courage as he stared up at Marx from the floor. “Screw you.”

  The woman pulled out her cell phone and punched a key. “Mr. Forbes? The subject has chosen not to cooperate.”

  Tokaido struggled as the guards descended on him, but the big men manhandled him with ease back into the hanging manacles. Marx unplugged her computer from the ruins of Akira’s laptop. She shook her head and walked out the door.

  Tokaido wondered how often Marx checked her instant messaging. His speculation turned to stark terror as he heard Forbes’s voice down the hallway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  “I’m sending you the files now, Aaron.”

  Hunt Wethers sent the decrypted German intelligence files to Aaron Kurtzman’s workstation. Translation software had converted the files, memos and reports into English. Kurtzman leaned forward, his fingers flying as he briefly scanned document after document. Just as there were two Koreas, there had once been two Germanys and during the height of the twentieth century’s cold war they had been split as decisively by ideology as they had been by the concrete wall, barbed wire, mines and machine gun towers that had split them geographically. The two Germanys had engaged in a decades-long clandestine war every bit as bloody and ruthless as that between the Koreas.

  It appeared that Laurentius Deyn had been in the absolute thick of it.

  File after file scrolled in front of Kurtzman’s eyes, telling tales of undercover operations, kidnapping and assassination and desperate battles on both sides of the Berlin Wall that the rest of the world had never known. It was information the German government would never want known. History perceived West Germany as the good guy in the cold war, but their hands were far from clean. It made for fascinating reading. Kurtzman pieced through stories of betrayal and blackmail, double and triple agents, and the willing sacrifice of assets on both sides as pawns in the greater game. Mack Bolan’s words rang in Aaron Kurtzman’s head.

  Revenge, Bear. That’s the key to taking this guy down.

  But revenge for what? The West had won the cold war. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The Berlin Wall had fallen and there was now a relatively peaceful, unified Germany. In many ways the eastern portion of Germany was still the poor cousin. They were still playing catch-up from almost half a century of Communist inefficiency and infrastructure. Where in all this did Laurentius Deyn’s thirst for vengeance lay?

  Nothing leaped out.

  They would have to work up each file piece by piece and pray they found some sort of link. Every second at this point was very likely an eternity of anguish for Akira, and Kurtzman’s every instinct clamored that he was missing something. He brought up Deyn’s personal file again. He was sixty-eight and a widower. His wife had died of stroke-related complications five years ago. He had lost his two sons in a tragic boating accident decades ago. Plenty of reasons for a man to grow bitter in his old age, but Kurtzman just couldn’t see vengeance on a thermonuclear level, much less who the target might be.

  “Could the wife have been murdered, Hunt?”

  “We have the doctors’ files. She had a stroke and lived with the complications for about a year before another stroke killed her. We have a copy of the autopsy. No sign of foul play. No police reports. Nothing attached to Deyn’s fitness or psych reports indicate anything out of the ordinary about his relationship with his wife or her demise.”

  “And his sons?”

  “Both died in a boating accident, on holiday among the North Frisian Islands. It was fully investigated. We have the police reports.”

  Kurtzman contemplated the enigma of Laurentius Deyn for the thousandth time. “The
y were both in the military?”

  “They both served in the German navy. They were both combat swimmers and were both honorably discharged.”

  “Hack their records.”

  “We did.” Wethers swiveled at his workstation. “We have their military records and the police reports.”

  “We hacked the German Office of Intelligence of the Armed Services.” Kurtzman called up the service ID photos of the two deceased young Deyns. “I want to hack the BND.”

  “The BND?” Wethers was appalled. “That’s German Federal Intelligence Service, Bear. That’s their CIA and NSA all rolled up into one. If we get caught hacking old, cold war documents from the proceeding century they’ll be upset, but if we get caught hacking current BND files that’s technically an act of war.”

  “Do it. The President said the thermonuclear devices must be located and retrieved at any and all costs. I think that covers all the bases.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Something that Mack said. He said this guy wants revenge.”

  “Yeah, but revenge for what? A boating accident?”

  Kurtzman turned away from the screen. His instincts were speaking to him loud and clear. “You know what they say the worst thing on earth is?”

  Wethers nodded soberly. “For a parent to bury their child.”

  “Deyn buried both of them. His line is ended. He wants revenge.” Kurtzman turned back to the screen. “And his sons didn’t die in any boating accident.”

  LAURENTIUS DEYN looked out over the water thinking of his sons when the office intercom buzzed and Clay Forbes’s voice came over the speaker. “It’s Forbes, boss.”

  Deyn shoved his anger back down to the dark place within himself where it festered it and grew. “Come in.”

  Forbes’s mass took up most of the little metal room. His tailored suit jacket and silk shirt were gone. He had stripped to his sleeveless T-shirt and removed his watch and rings. His T-shirt and hands were stained with blood.

  Deyn offered Forbes a chair. “So how is our guest?”

  “Tougher than I thought,” Forbes acknowledged. “Mahke wants your permission to go hardcore on him.”

  “One attracts more bees with honey, I believe the saying goes.”

  “Normally I’d agree with you, but his guy knows he’s dead meat. He pulled a last act of defiance and fried his computer.” Forbes scowled at one bloodstained fist. “Now he’s gone salty. He’s just holding on as long possible on the outside hope that his friends will come and rescue him.”

  “That is on a very low order of probability.”

  Forbes grinned. “That is a fact.”

  “What is his medical condition?”

  Forbes scowled. “He’s had the bejesus beaten out him. The medic says he has a concussion, as well as cracked ribs and contusions and other minor-to-significant injuries too numerous to count.”

  “The bottom line?”

  “The doc strongly recommends we don’t hit him in the head anymore.” Forbes shrugged. “Your boy Mahke wants to start cutting, starting with the toes and then working up toward intimacy.”

  “And what do you think, Clay?”

  “I think he took too many hits in Berlin. His body is all busted up, but his will is still intact. I think if we go hardcore or electrical on him he might just vapor lock on us before we can extract anything useful. As much as I’d love to do it, I suppose after all we should save the hardcore shit for the last resort. What’s our timetable?”

  Deyn checked his Omega Seamaster watch. “We are on schedule for seventy-two hours. Past that time any information you can extract will be superfluous. I gather you wish to use chemical interrogation methods?”

  “The punk has proved he can take a punch, but he’s tech-ops, not a field agent. I want to hit him with sodium Pentothal again and then administer 400 micrograms of LSD-25. We give him a couple of hours to let it sink in and then hit him with lights, sound and suggestion, take him to the places where the bad dreams are. I predict within twenty-four hours I can have that boy babbling like a brook.”

  “And should those methods fail?”

  “Then Mahke starts cutting lunch meat.”

  Deyn smiled. “I do enjoy your metaphors, Clay. Tell me, did you observe Franka during the initial interrogation?”

  “We caught it all on camera, she clearly is unhappy about torture, but so far all she suspects is beatings.” Forbes looked at Deyn pointedly. “I know she’s a highly valuable asset, but just how much does she know?”

  “She knows we are engaged in something illegal. However, she believes it involves technological espionage against the United States on a grand scale. She is not aware of the end game, and I intend to keep it that way until the last moment.”

  FRANKA MARX STARED at the screen of her laptop in shock. Her instant messaging window informed her that she had an unread message. The message was from Akira Tokaido. Franka swiftly disconnected her laptop from her docking station. Her first instinct was that Tokaido had downloaded a virus into her computer, hoping to infect her entire system. She knew her number-one priority should be to close the laptop and take it directly to Herr Deyn.

  Marx began furiously chewing on a pencil.

  There was zero chance of Tokaido infecting the computer system. He would know that she would isolate the laptop before opening the message. Perhaps he just wanted to destroy her laptop in revenge, but she had four of them onsite and all information was backed up in a variety of formats. Even if he had managed to ruin the operating system on this one laptop it was a tiny, spiteful act of revenge and she could not imagine it was worth the beating he had received for it. Marx shuddered as she thought of the bloody, beaten young man hanging in chains. He had shown immense bravery, and the only logical conclusion was that Tokaido was trying to communicate with her, and without Deyn or Forbes knowing about it.

  Fear and curiosity twisted in the woman’s stomach. Her pencil snapped in two in her hand. Her finger seemed to move with a will of its own as she clicked her cursor on the message.

  The two and half lines of code she had seen the young man type on the screen appeared in the window. It appeared to be a simple cipher, with letters, numbers and symbols substituted for other letters, numbers and symbols, though it was impressive that he could type in code from memory, particularly in his present circumstances. Franka Marx broke code for living. She broke code in her spare time for fun. She pulled a disk of cipher breaking software she had personally designed out of a drawer in her workstation and loaded it.

  If Tokaido was indeed trying to communicate with her, the cipher would be deliberately easy to break. He would only have used the code to give himself the few vital seconds to sneak it past his captors. She told the software to assume the cipher was in the English language, and it instantly began to attack the code. The software looked for repetition and matches in the most commonly used consonants and then began trying to match them with the most common vowel pairings to build words and then sentences. Lines of code scrolled down Marx’s screen as the software crunched the two and half lines of code at tens of thousands of combinations per second.

  It took her software exactly one minute and seventeen seconds to break Tokaido’s cipher. It informed her that it believed the literal translation was accurate to ninety-nine percent. It then asked her if she wanted it to assume the translated words themselves were a word-for-word code and continue attacking.

  There was no need. Marx simply stared at the two and a half lines the man had typed and transmitted before she had interrupted him and the beatings had resumed.

  DEYN HAS TWENTY-FIVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

  HE PLANS TO USE THEM

  HELP ME STOP

  Franka Marx was far more than a genius at number crunching. She was a hacker who did battle across the worldwide datum plane for IESHEN Group. Her instincts were as sharp as her intellect. Against her will, her mind instantly began sorting the orders, directives and actions she’d received and coor
dinated over the past six months. She read the three sparse lines again.

  Franka Marx felt her world spinning out of control.

  She jumped out her chair as the intercom buzzed and Laurentius Deyn’s voice spoke. “Franka, I need you, now. Come immediately.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Akira Tokaido twisted, screaming his throat raw as rats ate out his eyes. Two hours ago they had injected him with something. It had begun pleasantly enough. He had learned to recognize the relaxing effect of the sodium Pentothal, but there had been two needles. As the drugs began working on the 5-HT2 serotonin receptors in his brain and spinal chord, his pain had backed away to a much more endurable background of aching and throbbing. Despite his situation he felt a general sense of euphoria and well-being. When he began to see trails of pretty colors when he moved his head, he had suddenly realized he was on an acid trip. They had given him a full ninety minutes to let the LSD-25 settle into his cerebral cortex and coil around his centers of mood cognition and perception. At the same time the drug had invaded his locus ceruleus, the brain region that received sensory signals from all areas of the body. At ninety minutes the real fun began.

  They had started with noise, hitting him with the piped sounds of gunfire, the moans of the dying and the screams of horses being killed, all at horrific decibels. At the same time they had played with the lights, alternately strobing them and then plunging him into darkness. In a phenomenon known as synesthesia Tokaido “heard” colors and “saw” sounds, and the colors were all blood and fire and the sounds formed the shapes of utter nightmare. LSD users often reported mental transitions so rapid they seemed to experience multiple emotions at the same time. His emotional landscape was blind terror and crushing despair. Any good hippie knew that on one’s first LSD trip it was best to have a “guide” or experienced hallucinogenic drug abuser to help the first timer “safely” through the rapid emotional shifts and altered perceptions.

  Tokaido’s guide was Clay Forbes, and the former SEAL was intent on deliberately leading the young man into a bad trip rather than away from one, and to personally insure that the bad trip Akira was on was a Halloween horror show of epic proportions. Forbes had turned the lights off and spent half an hour hurling the young man around the cell while wearing night-vision goggles. He’d blasted him with a fire hose, hung him upside down and shook him in the blackness, shouting words like bear, farm and politician in his ears. The former SEAL had finished the initial session by stringing the computer hacker back up in his chains, turning the lights off again, ramming his thumbs against his eyeballs and informing him that rats were eating his eyes.