“Come on.” I wasn’t in the mood to wait around because it was going to get highly radioactive in a very few minutes.
Wonder and I sprinted back the way we’d come, along the low ledge that ran behind the containment building, Marcel’s limp body jouncing on my shoulder. I thought we were doing great. That was when the area radiation monitors went off.
Talk about your fucking bells and whistles—there were Klaxons and sirens and all the goddamn lights in the entire plant seemed to come on at once.
“What the fuck?”
I didn’t know what the fuck either. All I could think of was that we hadn’t hosed off enough from the radwaste pool» so we’d tripped one of the fucking ARMS antiradiation sensors. Either that or they’d been on to us and they were springing their trap now.
I radioed for a sitrep. Bottom line: Wonder and I were the only ones left inside the perimeter. Actually, that was good news. We just had to worry about us. We worked our way alongside the containment building, crossed a small patch of grass behind the power block, and made our way cautiously alongside the glass walls of the modernistic control center.
I dropped Marcel’s body and crouched alongside it as a white-smocked, four-eyed dweeb came out the side door, leaned up against the wall, and lit a cigarette not two feet from where I lay in the only shadow in fifteen feet. Shit—didn’t he know that smoking was hazardous to my health? I stood up. He turned toward me, his jaw dropped, and he started to say something.
But he didn’t: Stevie came up behind him, dropped him with a choker hold, and laid him gently on the grass. Then we sprinted for the administration building. Wonder vaulted the fence first, then helped me bring Marcel over the razor wire. It tore him up a bit, and he landed on his head—but so what. We worked hurriedly, mindless of sensors, cameras, or any other intrusion devices. Once we were clear, we hauled balls for the rendezvous point.
We pulled off the road near Ventimiglia to do a quick stat check and a field interrogation. Marcel Mustache’s wallet held two thousand English pounds, and a reservation slip in his name at a hotel somewhere in Dorsetshire, made through Bruton Travel, for three nights next week. The other papers included an agreement for the charter of a Lear jet, and a pocket diary handwritten in Arabic.
I was intrigued. I had a real need to know what Marcel was planning in Britain. Rodent popped the trunk. I pulled Marcel out and tried to stand him up. He wouldn’t comply. Nasty, who’s had medical training, checked him over and discovered why.
“He’s gone, Skipper. Neck’s broke.”
It occurred to me that I was two for two in dead-prisoner statistics. First, I’d lost Azziz in Cairo. Now Marcel.
We worked quickly, burying the body in the railroad right-of-way just off the highway, while Duck Foot tried to make head and tail of the Arabic scrawls in the diary.
We finished our work before he finished his. But he got the gist of things for me. “Bottom line, Skipper, is that Marcel handed off six—I can’t make it out—somethings to Brookfield yesterday.”
Bingo. Lord B was on the move to Pakistan with six cans of BW agent. We pulled back onto the highway and headed east, while I tried to figure out what the hell to do. The radio was buzzing about the explosion at Numéro Douze. From what the announcer said, we’d done considerable damage: the plant would be off-line for about six weeks. In another positive note, the frogs, it seemed, were blaming everything on antinukers, so it looked as if we were going to be in the clear—at least for the immediate future.
I took the time to burst Mick Owen, too. Even though we were working on SAS’s secure comms, which NSA can’t read, you don’t want to crowd the satellite, especially when there are people looking for you. So I kept my message short. I told him exactly what was on the cans Wonder and I had taken and asked for instructions. I added that six cans were already with Lord B, on their way to Pakistan. I let him know about Marcel Mustache’s reservations in Dorsetshire, suggesting he send someone down there to register under the right name, to wait and see what turned up.
Mick must have been sitting in front of the fucking SATCOM, because I got a fast answer back. He signaled that my canister query was being processed ASAP and he’d have results within the hour. He said he’d check on the hotel in Dorsetshire. He asked what about our plans.
I responded. Said we’d be going east—following Brookfield—and could he help us, as my cash was running low. I couldn’t use the bogus credit cards in Europe. In fact, I couldn’t use ’em anywhere they had computers, because once the store or airline ticket desk enters the account numbers, it takes about ten seconds until they realize the plastic’s fake. Then they call the cops and arrest you on the spot. That would be bad juju.
Mick bursted me the name of a contact at La Spezia—a colonnello who’d advance me twenty thousand pounds, give us whatever equipment we’d need, and take the lethal cans off our hands so they could be forwarded covertly to him back in Britain for analysis. And he took the liberty of suggesting that we go through Brindisi, to Corfu by ferry, take a second boat to the Albanian mainland, grab a bus to Tirana, and fly out of there.
I transmitted: “We must be married.” I’d been thinking roughly the same thing. It made perfect sense. Albania was the poorest country in the region. They needed hard currency. They wouldn’t ask too many questions. And best of all, there were no computers in Albania to help track us down. I could buy our tickets to Pakistan with impunity: it would be a week before they realized we’d used forged cards, by which time we’d be long gone. I gave Mick a Bravo Zulu for his job well done. I noted that I’d be using the name Snerd when I called his Italian pal, just in case Marcinko was on anybody’s computer.
We waited another half hour, until Mick signaled an analysis of our booty. He’d run it past his top BW people and they’d gotten very upset, because, he said, they’d told him he wasn’t supposed to know about this stuff. It was a lethal and—most disturbing—virtually indestructible combination of anthrax and plague that had been developed by the Russians only last year. It was known as BA-PP3/I.
That was worrisome. Worrisome, shit—it was downright frightening. I knew about inhalation anthrax. As the CO of SEAL Team Six, I’d been told about Soviet experiments in biological warfare. In 1979, more than sixty people died when a canister of anthrax broke open at a military research facility at Sverdlovsk, just east of the Urals in the central USSR. BA-PP3/I was the latest and most deadly variation of that research.
It combined the almost-always fatal qualities of inhalation anthrax with the deadliest configuration of plague, known as pneumonic plague. The combination is 100 percent fatal if it’s not diagnosed and treated within a few hours of infection—which is virtually impossible when it infects a bunch of victims during a terrorist incident.
Let’s pause here for a short course in biological warfare etiology, courtesy of Dr. J. D. Robinson, M.D., a Washington D.C.-based physician who taught this stuff to me when I ran SEAL Team Six. And don’t skip the following few paragraphs, either. As the wise, old chiefs at Officer Candidate School used to tell us, “You will see this material again.”
Inhalation anthrax—Bacillus anthracis, or B. anthracis in the textbooks—is an airborne bacillus, or rod-shaped bacteria. The spores have a natural resistance to both heat and cold that can be intensified by scientific development In other words, you can develop a strain of B. anthracis that is virtually indestructible.
How does it work? Well, gentle reader, let me take you through a cycle. Let’s say a terrorist detonates a biological-warfare bomb in a crowded location. Victoria Station. Los Angeles International Airport. The World Series.
Hundreds are killed or wounded by the explosion. That’s to be expected. There’s confusion. There’s chaos. Mr. Murphy is hard at work. And no one realizes that the bomb spewed BA-PP3/I over a sixteen-square-mile area (that’s right, friends—the range of one of these little canisters is four miles by four miles) because no one was looking for biological evidence—the authori
ties send only EOD personnel—the bomb squad.
But inside that explosive Trojan horse hides the real killer. We already know that BA-PP3/I is impervious to heat. It is, therefore, perfectly camouflaged by high explosive. C-4. Semtex. Generic plastique—Ka-boom! And thus, out into the air go billions of invisible, pestilent, B. anthracis spores released by the explosion.
Who breathes them? Anybody within those sixteen square miles, or even a few more, depending on the wind conditions. But, since these soon-to-be-dead folks weren’t injured in the blast, they go home and consider themselves lucky.
Doom on them. After one to five days of incubation, the victims begin to experience general malaise, which is Dr. Robinson’s polite way of saying that they feel like shit. They don’t sleep right. They wake up fatigued. They get myalgia—a $20 word that means their muscles hurt. They cough and their joints ache. Maybe they call their doctors because they feel as if they’re coming down with a cold.
By now, they’re already as good as dead. But they don’t know it. In fact, all of a sudden, many victims now begin to feel improved. Maybe there was the hint of a fever—but now it’s disappeared. So they go back to work, telling their colleagues they thought they were getting the current croup or flu or whatever this season’s “it” (as in “it’s going around”) may be. Terrific—they’ve now infected their workplace.
And suddenly, twelve hours later, they get hit with a fucking ton of bricks. First there’s severe respiratory distress—they can’t breathe, and when they do, they sound like goddamn gasping, wheezing bronchitic smokers. They sweat pints—losing vital body fluid. Their skin goes white—then blue. Their temperature soars. They go into shock and lose consciousness. Then they die. Total time from initial breathing of the BA-PP3/I bacillus: 190-240 hours.
Let’s move on to pneumonic plague. It comes from Yersinia pestis, a plump, polymorphic bacillus. Under normal lab conditions, Y. pestis are susceptible to sudden temperature fluctuations. But the strain developed by the pesky Russkies was somehow able to withstand extremes both of heat and cold, making it a perfect “coupler” to the anthrax.
Plague’s initial symptoms are similar to those of anthrax—the same sort of severe malaise, headache, intermittent fever and chills—except they are often accompanied by a swelling of the lymph glands under the arms or in the groin area. The initial stage lasts forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Then shit really happens. Pneumonic plague victims feel constantly nauseated. Sometimes they vomit uncontrollably. Most also suffer from bloody diarrhea. The lungs are affected, too, causing victims to cough blood. It’s not a pleasant disease, believe me. But it doesn’t last long—seventy-two hours at most. Then comes death. Total time from inception: five to eight days. I don’t want to use a bunch of technical language on you, but sometimes you just gotta. Here it is: BA-PP3/I is some mean, motherfucking shit.
Okay, okay. I can see a few of you out there holding up your hands and saying, “Whoa, there, Demo Dick—what’s going on?” You’re surprised. You’re asking me how come the Russkies, our new pals and virtual allies, are still developing biological weapons of mass destruction, then giving them to tango organizations, when they can’t pay their own bills at home and they’re begging for Americanski aid.
Let me explain something. The death of the Soviet Union was simply another step in a continuing battle. Some of our exalted leaders fail to grasp this obvious fact, which is why they’re shocked when they discover—horror on horror’s head—that the Russians are still recruiting American intelligence officers to spy for them.
My friends, get real. We won the Cold War by driving the old Soviet Union into bankruptcy; by making them spend 74 percent of every ruble on defense until they crumbled from within. Now, however, the Cold War revisionists—a bunch of ’em are currently running the State Department, not to mention the do-nothing can’t cunt dip-dunk thumb-sucking hind-tit asshole dweebs who control most of the country’s think tanks and universities—have decreed that it wasn’t military intimidation and defense policy that kept the Soviets off edge, but the politically correct policy of gentle restraint (more accurately called whimpering appeasement) that led to the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
Excuse me, but that’s a pile of horse pucky. Of course, I’m not here to argue history. I’m here to talk about terrorism-based biological warfare. Fact: Lord B and was on his way to Pakistan, home of a growing fundamentalist Muslim population bent on mayhem. Fact: Pakistan sits next door to Afghanistan, a country with more terrorist training camps per square mile than anywhere else on earth, no government, and the world’s most plentiful supply of opium poppies. Fact: the bad guys were packing six canisters of BA-PP3/I, which made them DFTs—Dangerous Fucking Tangos—in anybody’s book.
Ultimate fact: I had to stop them before they passed the canisters on to their final destination and a whole bunch of innocent people got hurt.
We made the journey to La Spezia with no problems. I used my Brit pounds and U.K. passport when I changed money in San Remo—we still had just over one hundred of the fifty-pound notes I’d taken from Azziz in Cairo. I gave each of the men five hundred pounds in cash, kept fifteen hundred myself, and turned the rest into lira, which made me a millionaire, so far as Italian money was concerned. Because we hadn’t used the jamming equipment, I was reasonably certain that NSA hadn’t sent the cavalry after us. Still, there was no need to take any chances. We’d pay cash for everything.
We stopped in Genoa for lunch, staying out of the chaos of the port area and heading instead for a rustic little taverna I know on the Via della Libertà on the eastern edge of the city. Then it was on through Rapallo, Chiavari, and Borghetto di Vara moving at a steady 120 kilometers per hour, until we pulled into La Spezia just before cocktail time. Nasty, Tommy, and Duck Foot, who had arrived first on their bikes, had already begun to make a dent in the beer supply at the Jolly Hotel.
I dialed the number Mick had provided and waited as the phone bring-bringed half a dozen times.
“Pronto.”
“Colonel Angelotti?”
“Sì.”
“My name is Snerd. I’m a friend of your friend in London.”
There was a momentary pause. “Sì, sì. Of course. I’m so glad you are in town.”
“So am I. Can we meet?”
“Of course we can. I have been looking forward to it. But not at my office, please. Let’s have dinner, instead, so I can show you a taste of our Ligurian cuisine.”
That sounded good to me and I told him so. “I have a few fellow tourists with me.”
“That will be no problem. I gather from our mutual acquaintance that you have some friends who live here in town, too.”
He was asking whether or not I knew a lot of the Italian Frogmen—Incursari—and whether or not they knew me, too. Good point.
“I do—I know a lot of them.”
“Then we should meet at a wonderful little trattoria outside La Spezia itself, so we can keep things private. Take the old road south out of town to Portovénere. There is a little restaurant there called Gambero, and I will see you there at twenty thirty. You cannot miss the restaurant. There is also a hotel close by where you might want to stay.”
“Mille grazie, Colonnello.”
“It is nothing, signore.” The phone went dead.
His suggestions sounded good. But just to make sure we weren’t being set up, we drove down to the port immediately and surveilled the restaurant and streets around it. Paranoid? Maybe—but I didn’t want any surprises.
We set up a countersurveillance at 1830. By 2015 I decided that things were kosher. We assembled, walked into the restaurant, and ordered six carafes of the vino di tavola. The place overlooked the harbor, and we took a big window table. The only other patron was a tubby little guy in the corner who bore a curious resemblance to Porky Pig. He was dressed in an incongruous, loud plaid sport coat wore his hair slicked, and sported a pencil mustache. He was working on a platter of deep-
fried squid and a liter of white wine.
We sipped and watched as Porky finished two plates of squid and a second carafe of wine. He caught me gawking and smiled at me. I felt stupid. We ordered a second round of vino and some antipasti as well. After all, it was past 2100 and the colonel hadn’t showed yet. By 2130 I was beginning to get upset. Then Porky arose and waddled over to our table.
“You must be Signore Snerd. Buona sera. I am Luciano Angelotti.” He smiled. “Please, Signore Snerd, take your chin off the floor.”
“You’re Colonnello Angelotti?”
“Sì.”
“But—”
“Ah, you assumed since I am a friend of your friend Mick Owen, I would be—how do you say?—specialized forces, Sì?”
“Sì.”
“To the contrary. I have known Mick for years. We became good friends when I was in support of—how do you say it?—a joint activity, yes? In Sardinia. I needed something. He provided. He could have gotten in great trouble for doing so—maybe it would have finished his career. But still he went the extra for me. I was very, very grateful.”
“Mick’s like that.”
The Italian nodded. “Yes, Mick’s like that. Anyway, since then we have been a—what do you say?—mutual aid society.”
“Were you ever in Special Forces?”
Angelotti roared with laughter and patted his ample midsection. “Never, signore,” he said with a flourish of mock anger. “I don’t swim, I never earned parachute wings—to be honest, I haven’t even fired a rifle since basic training.”
“Then what do you do?”
He smiled beneficently, appropriated a chair from the adjacent table, plunked himself down at ours, and poured himself a huge glass of wine. He peered through thick, wire-framed glasses at my shooters, then downed the glass of wine. “First, on behalf of the Italian armed forces—although I’ll never tell them about your visit—let me welcome you to Italy.”
“Mille grazie, Colonnello,” Tommy T said. “We are honored to be here with you.”
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