The Sword of Cyrus: A Thriller (A Rossler Foundation Mystery Book 4)

by JC Ryan

  Now, though, Harper had realized that there was indeed some need to prepare. He wasn’t going to run away, and evacuation of the cities was impractical, but what if Lewis and his crew were able to stop some but not all of the bombs? What if the Sword of Cyrus didn’t bother with anthrax in truly rural areas or minor cities? Then there would be a need for the citizens who were unaffected to be policed, and the survivors of any devastated areas to be aided. Harper kicked himself for not thinking of it before. FEMA was going to be completely overwhelmed, whatever happened. There was no time to lose; last-minute preparations had to begin immediately.

  Handicapped by not knowing where the bombs could be stopped and where they wouldn’t be, Harper knew he had to put the preparations in the hands of experts, and hope that this time, as before, he and his friends, advisers and his government would come out on top. As he explained the news to the horrified men and women in the conference room, he ended with a bold statement.

  “We are not accepting this as fate, ladies and gentlemen. Good will prevail over evil. As I dismiss you to attend to your own areas of responsibility, remember this. Whatever you need to prepare as well as you can, you have only to ask. My next address will be to Congress. I promise you that the funds you require will be available, or I’ll know the reason why not. In this matter, we need to all work together, regardless of partisan differences. God bless you. You may go now.”

  Some took pride in their leader, while others grumbled and muttered about not having enough time. No one had yet fully taken in the enormity of what they’d just heard. Nevertheless, all got to work immediately to answer this unheard-of threat.

  Strike at the head

  July 10, 2020; D-day minus 19, Washington, DC

  Late in the afternoon of what had been a very long day with no sleep for Nigel Harper, he reconvened the National Security Council. Satellite imagery had located the lab, but word was there was little or no activity to indicate it was still in use. The question on the table was whether to strike at it or not. Harper was of the opinion that there was little to be gained if the informant was correct. If the bombs were already in the US, hitting the lab would do no good, could be a danger to innocent civilians in the area, and would alert the enemy to the level of intel that the US had.

  His military component, though, were hard to stand up to when their ire was raised. They’d had to stand by and let the spies do all the work so far. They wanted a piece of the action. They reasoned that failure to act would imply weakness, something the US had never been willing to admit to. In the end, the vote of the military advisers reinforced by the ones who’d been left out of the loop until this morning prevailed. A ship in the Persian Gulf was tasked to take out the facility, with the caution that the strike must be pinpoint accurate. Two FA-19G Super Hornets catapulted off the carrier and flew in low to avoid Iranian radar, lifted just high enough to clear the mountains surrounding Esfahan, and swooped in for the kill.

  The facility was destroyed, but along with it several surrounding businesses took damage as well. Twenty innocent civilians were killed, the collateral damage that the president and his security agencies had feared. It was a PR disaster.

  The news that a widespread nuclear attack on the West was imminent had not been given to the public. As far as the world was concerned, the US had carried out an unprovoked attack on a foreign country, killing civilians in the process. The outrage was instantaneous.

  The most vocal of the critics, of course, was the Ayatollah Khorasani, who was also in the dark concerning Dalir Jahandar’s plans. He immediately summoned the state TV station to his palace to film an enraged speech accusing the US of backstabbing. Not six months ago, Iran had led the Middle East in attempting to make peace with the West, and to extend the hand of friendship. They had kept their end of the bargain, and now the US had perpetrated an uncalled-for attack on the sovereign soil of Iran.

  All the while Dalir Jahandar was secretly smiling – the infidels had played right into his hands. They had killed innocent people and restored the hatred for them which was absent for so many months.

  Khorasani called for an immediate sanction of the US by all civilized countries of the world. “Stand with us against these bullies,” he said. “For as soon as they destroy us, they will also destroy the rest of you. No one can be friends with a nation that seeks to dominate the world.”

  The cry was soon taken up by every other Middle Eastern nation, and then the smaller countries whose leadership had not been made aware of the coming nuclear holocaust.

  Harper was devastated. By giving in to his advisers, he’d allowed a media disaster that would be surpassed only by the attack that could still occur in a little over two weeks. Now, rather than focus on helping his government be prepared, he must spend time mending fences with skeptical governments who demanded an explanation for the attack. What to tell them, which of them may denounce him after receiving the information and prematurely release it to the world, weighed heavily on him. No matter how he was viewed by whatever population was left afterward, he couldn’t allow widespread panic to cause more damage than the nanonukes would.

  State of the mission

  July 15, 2020 D-day minus 14, Washington, DC

  Early on the morning of the fifteenth of July, Sam Lewis convened a meeting of his counterparts in the other agencies, the representatives of the security agencies of Great Britain, Germany, Israel and a handful of other countries who were let in on the secret, and his science advisers. Raj, Roy, Sinclair and Daniel had flown in the previous night to sit in. With just two weeks to prevent the holocaust, they were there to assess the state of their mission.

  Sam began by stating what they knew. It was quite a lot, considering the short time they’d been gathering intel since the photos had been discovered. They knew the date of the attack, and that it was just two weeks away. They knew most of the targets, or so they thought. Sam cautioned that the Sword of Cyrus could have changed some after Oleg’s capture, which had surely been discovered by now. It was also possible that the 10th Cycle library had never had pictures of all the targets. However, the sheer numbers of targets that they did have, based on pictures, intel gathered by hackers and Oleg’s interrogation, made them believe that they had 99% of them.

  With Roy’s help, Sam explained how the bombs would be assembled, probably already had been if Oleg’s information was accurate. In addition, Roy detailed what components were in each bomb, including the fuels and the fact that they would be triggered by the CLEC device, for which they’d stolen his own invention of the nanolaser plans. Photos of the destroyed warehouse where Roy tested the tiny replica of the device were passed around along with charts of the calculated power of varying amounts of fuel according to the sizes of the devices they’d found out from hacked emails.

  Now Sam took over, talking about the rest of the information they’d extracted from Oleg, who was still in custody awaiting his fate. He’d told them that drones would be used to deliver most of the bombs. To places like the central courtyard of the Pentagon, behind the fences at the front door of the White House, to courtyards or other protected places at Buckingham Palace, even, shockingly, the Dome of the Rock. By the latter, they knew that this was not an operation mounted by religious Muslims, but an act of overwhelming terrorism meant to utterly destroy everything in the path of its leaders.

  Sam told the hushed assembly that Oleg had revealed the origin of the name of the group, the Sword of Cyrus. In telling the story of the Persian emperor who’d nearly conquered the entire world, he came to the realization that this wasn’t about Islam at all. It was about restoration of Persian supremacy. The audacity of the scheme nearly crushed him at that moment. His presentation unfinished, he sat down, momentarily overwhelmed. Daniel, seeing that Sam needed a moment, swiftly stood up and took over, though his part of the presentation had been slated for a little later.

  What Daniel had to say was a bombshell in and of itself. Gesturing to Raj and Sinclair, he revealed
that they had learned, by closely studying the ancient images of the future, the GPS coordinates to within perhaps one-hundred yards, of the center of each explosion. This information could serve to evacuate much of the endangered population, although where to send them remained a problem. According to their informant, Oleg, evacuation would not save most from death due to the second wave of attacks, with the anthrax virus. Or even from complications arising from the EMP, which Zlatovski had told them would be maximized by the altitude of the detonation.

  They also knew, Sinclair having decoded a problematic bit of data from one of the pictures, the time of each hit. Once Sinclair discovered the purpose of the bit of data from one picture, the rest were quickly decoded as well. It appeared that, rather than strike everywhere at once as they had on the previous year’s Fourth of July, the strikes were timed to catch the most people at ground zero as possible.

  By the time Daniel’s news had been discussed and all questions that Raj and Sinclair could answer asked and answered, Sam had recovered his composure and was ready to go on. He went back to the method of delivery and the problems they would have in stopping it.

  Several of the intercepted messages had given the formula for a paint mixture that didn’t make sense until the investigators had raided and confiscated material from a house where a drone was being readied for the attack. With most of the components available at any Home Depot or Lowe’s, the paint became stealth technology with the addition of carbon nanoparticles smuggled into the country and delivered to the conspirators. Any paint that was high in silica and zinc oxide would do as the medium for what he called the active ingredient, the carbon nanoparticles.

  Tests confirmed that the stealth paint rendered conventional radar and other detection systems useless. Even if they could risk shooting down the drones, not being able to find them was the real problem. The one advantage they had, if they could find a way to exploit it, was knowing also from Oleg that the drones would be controlled from a mobile control unit that would have to be relatively close to the target, within two to five miles. If they could locate the MCUs, they may be able to stop the signals that would detonate the bombs.

  It was probably too much to hope for to find them all. Even though each MCU would control several drones for the detonation, the insurmountable fact was, there were hundreds of bombs. No one doubted that no matter what they did, massive destruction would take place somewhere. That was because of some critical gaps in their knowledge.

  The final thing to think about was the anthrax drones. That posed a bit of a problem because there were no know targets and no pictures from the library. Furthermore, in all likelihood they would be different types of drones than the bomb carrying ones. Sinclair posed the opinion that if there were no pictures of it, that most probably meant it was not going to happen, whether the bombs exploded or not.

  Quite a philosophical argument ensued, with some insisting that Sinclair was right, and others insisting that relying on it was foolhardy. The most practical response came from Roy, who said, “Why not work on the assumption that those drones will be deployed, but plan to use the same method that will stop the bomb carrying drones to stop the anthrax bombs as well? There has to be a trigger for either event. Why would they have bothered to invent two? It’s probably the same method, either way.”

  Three things we need to figure out

  July 15, 2020 D-Day minus 14, Washington, DC

  After a short break for dinner, the meeting at the JOCC continued. No one would sleep until they had a plan of action that seemed it may have a chance of success, or until they dropped, whichever came first. With the deadline looming and the practical matter of getting personnel and materiel in place, there was little more than a week to find a solution.

  The group now had a firm grasp on what they did know. What they didn’t know was what type of drones would be used, though inquiries to online vendors had urgently requested their cooperation in providing records of all drone purchases over the past six months, arranged by date of order. National Guard units would be dispatched to the addresses where the drones were delivered, with the full realization that those addresses could have been just the first step in getting the drones to the places where they would be assembled and loaded with the nanonuke payloads.

  There had been some push-back at first. The biggest online vendors didn’t want to be seen as invading their customers’ privacy. An in-person visit from a CIA emissary to the CEO of each firm quickly overcame the objection, though it left some board members puzzled as to why the CEO had changed his or her mind so quickly. Tracking down the deliveries was ongoing. There was a strong doubt whether they’d all be found.

  Meanwhile, in the JOCC, the other questions were being discussed and the challenges laid out. One of the most important questions was how the CLEC would be triggered. It was one thing to control the flight of the drones with a single smartphone controller, but another to signal all of the bombs being triggered at the same time. The most hopeful answer was that a single frequency would trigger all of the CLECs at the same time. If that were the case, then finding the mobile control unit and disabling it would be all that was required to prevent the bombs it controlled from detonating.

  The first suggestion was to use the same type of electro-magnetic pulse that had killed the nukes the Ayatollah had tried to deploy. The SEMP, or sustained electro-magnetic pulse, would also kill all other electronic devices in the area, but that was preferable to allowing the nukes to go off. They would have to ground all air flights on that day, of course, so they wouldn’t have planes falling out of the sky, too.

  However, Roy nixed that solution by saying that nanofuels often took on unexpected properties. He cautioned that a SEMP could just as easily set off the reaction as not. In reality, that solution wouldn’t have worked anyway. It was only built into a few of the satellites orbiting the Earth. There weren’t enough of them to protect every target city. It would require more thought.

  The second, and just as important, was could they determine the location of the MCU based on the pictures? Sam was rather incorrectly calling it the epicenter, but no one called that to his attention, since it was as good a word as any other for what they were facing. Each MCU would set off overlapping explosions from the central location where the unsuspecting trigger man would be controlling it. To find him before he set off the bombs could prevent him being able to trigger it. Sending people to hunt him down could be a suicide mission, since they’d be caught in the blasts if they didn’t find him in time. On the other hand, everyone faced certain death anyway, unless they got far enough out of the target cities. No one in this room expected to survive unless they could prevent the detonation.

  The discussion had circled the table, each person there putting in his or her thoughts about the riddles they needed to solve. Roy, who’d been scribbling on a notepad as they talked, summed it up.

  “Okay. This is what we’re facing. We have to figure out a way to pick up the drones, probably at the very last minute. I don’t see them testing their stealth technology with a dress rehearsal. Second, we need to discover what frequency the MCU will use to control the drones, whether it’s a cell signal, RF, or what.” Seeing the nods around the table, as well as some others making notes, he went on.

  “We also need to know what the trigger mechanism for the CLEC will be, and determine whether we can jam that or not. Finally, we need to figure out where the trigger-men will be. Raj, I suggest you and Sinclair can help greatly in that effort. We already know where most of the bombs will hit, correct?”

  Raj nodded, his eyes intent on Roy. He was beginning to get a glimmer of what Roy was going to suggest.

  “It should be a relatively easy matter to triangulate the center, and have several operatives in the area to apprehend anyone using a cell phone. One of them will likely be our trigger-man.” The simplicity of that plan struck Sam as quite brilliant. He put several of his top navigational experts at Raj’s disposal and they immediately
went to work on pinpointing the probable locations of the trigger-men.

  By now, they’d all been at the table for a long twelve hours except for a short break for a meal. Sam, who hadn’t slept much at all since the crisis started, was beginning to look like a ghost with big black circles around his eyes. His top aides persuaded him to take a nap while they continued looking at all possible solutions to the challenges Roy had named. The rest of the Rossler Foundation people were also encouraged to rest and let the experts in military and espionage operations take the lead now. Reluctantly, they left the JOCC for their hotel. Roy’s mind was still buzzing, though.

  No trace of stutter

  July 16, 2020; D-day minus 13, Washington, DC

  Roy James thought of himself as a simple man, though he was among the most brilliant scientists in the world. That is, his desires were simple. All he needed to be happy were a comfortable place to sleep, food that he liked to eat, and the opportunity to do experiments to prove his theories. Lately, though, another desire had begun to intrude on the three basic ones. He often wished he could enjoy the company of a woman, and it was probably the fault of the only woman who’d ever made him comfortable other than his mother, Salome Lane.

  He recognized that she was both someone who could soothe his nerves just by her presence and a major contributor to his self-esteem, at least as it concerned his social anxiety. It didn’t seem to be such an outrageous hope that she could feel the same about him. He’d been with the Rossler Foundation for over six months now, long enough to see that close relationships between Daniel and Sarah Rossler, JR and Dr. Rebecca existed. Even the older men, Nicholas Rossler and Sinclair O’Reilly, enjoyed female companionship.