by Tom Clancy
“Status?”
“Mission clean.” No footprints, no evidence, no nothing. “Very clean.”
“Explain.”
“Later. I’m on my way home.”
He turned and started swimming.
SHANGHAI
KUAN-YIN Zhao heard a knock on his door, then feet softly padding toward his desk. He knew without looking who it was. Xun. His hesitant, mincing steps were unmistakable. Xun stopped before Zhao’s desk and stood quietly, waiting.
Zhao’s desk was covered in an array of newspapers from London, New York, Moscow, and Beijing. So far, the coverage was remarkably similar. No significant variations. The board was intact, all the pieces and players being taken at face value.
Zhao looked up. “Yes?”
“Message from Lei, sir. They’ve weighed anchor and are under way. The job is done.”
Zhao sighed. Even Xun’s voice was weak. The boy was smart enough, with degrees from Oxford and MIT, but he had no Lān-hút—no stones, as the Americans say. Xun was a distant nephew, one of the few with his family name left alive. This, he thought, is what I am left with. A boy who had a mind for this business, but no heart for the brutality it required to not only survive, but to rule. Given time, Xun might be a worthy successor to the empire; but time was a precious commodity. During war, time was a luxury you couldn’t afford to squander.
“No complications?” Zhao asked.
“No, sir.”
Zhao nodded. Another pawn steps forward, joining the first two, shielding the king.
“The emergency bands?”
“We’re monitoring. The island is small; it shouldn’t take long. May I ask, sir. . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“What are we listening for?”
“We’re listening for the faint scrape of our opponent’s piece moving across the board.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Watch and learn.”
Zhao waved Xun out. Alone again, Zhao closed his eyes and visualized the board. He imagined his opponent reaching out, fingers hesitating over one piece, before lifting it from the board.
Your move.
15
THIRD ECHELON
HAVING only been gone for fifteen hours, Fisher was stunned at what had changed during that time.
The town of Slipstone was lost.
Within minutes of local environmental officials determining that the source of the water supply’s contamination was neither natural nor accidental, the small New Mexico town had became the focal point of a massive relief effort, starting with the President’s order to activate the Radiological Emergency Response Plan, or RERP.
Assets from every branch of government, from the FBI to the Environmental Protection Agency, from the Department of Energy to Homeland Security, sprang into action, dispatching first-responder teams. Within six hours of the RERP’s initiation, Slipstone was quarantined. Every road, highway, and trail leading to and from the town was put under guard by state troopers. Those residents who had panicked upon hearing the news and hurried to leave the area were quickly rounded up and placed in the mobile quarantine and treatment camp that had been established by the Army’s Chemical Casualty Care Division. Unfortunately, this camp was one of the first scenes captured by news cameras: families being unceremoniously marched by biohazard-suited soldiers into a sterile white tent in the middle of the desert. The image sent shock waves across the country as Americans realized their worst nightmare had finally become reality: Terrorists had attacked the U.S. with a radiological weapon.
Meanwhile, the first responders to enter the town, a NEST team, found a greater nightmare waiting for them. Slipstone was a ghost town. Investigation would later show the water supply had been poisoned sometime in the afternoon, shortly before residents finished work and started heading home. Consquently, the streets were mostly deserted, with only a handful of bodies found, most of them in their cars as they had tried to escape the town. The bulk of the corpses were found in their homes, asleep, in front of television sets, in their bathrooms, and, heartbreakingly, sprawled beside the beds of their children, dead where they had fallen trying to reach their children.
Those few residents found alive shuffled through the streets like zombies: glassy-eyed, hair falling out in clumps, blood streaming from their eyes as the radiological poison slowly killed them. Those with any strength left headed toward the edge of town and the quarantine barriers, where they were stopped by state troopers and National Guard soldiers. This, too, was broadcast across the country: ghostly-white Slipstone residents, begging to be allowed to leave, while stone-faced soldiers and police officers forced them back into the hell they knew was killing them.
IN the Situation Room, Fisher watched, stunned, as the images paraded across the monitors. Across the country every broadcast and cable television channel, from the Food Network to Home Shopping Central, had either switched to emergency programming or had surrendered their signals to cable and network news coverage.
Sitting on either side of Fisher at the conference table, Grimsdottir and Lambert also watched in silence. Anna stifled a sob, then stood up and walked away.
“Good God,” Lambert muttered.
“How many?” Fisher asked. “Any idea?”
“Official figures won’t be released for a couple days, but Grim’s been monitoring the RERP’s secure frequencies. So far they only found fourteen survivors.”
“Out of how many?”
“According to the last census, five thousand plus.”
It took a moment for Fisher to absorb this number. He exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose. Unless the response teams were wrong and somewhere, somehow, there was a large group of survivors yet to be found in Slipstone, the death toll would far surpass that of 9/11.
“What’s happening in Washington?” Fisher asked.
“Both the House and Senate are in emergency session. The vote will be unanimous, I’m sure.”
“Declaration of war,” Sam murmured.
Lambert nodded. “Against nations unknown. The President is scheduled to talk to the nation at noon, our time.”
“What does this do to our mission?”
“Nothing. I spoke with the President while you were in the Bahamas. War is coming; there’s no way around that. Against who is the only question. He wants no stone left unturned, and no doubt about who’s responsible. Things are starting to snowball at the FBI and CIA now. Conclusions will be reached; recommendations made; targets chosen. Our job is to make sure—damn sure—we’ve got the right targets.”
The television screens went dark. Standing behind Fisher, Grimsdottir laid the remote on the table and said, “I can’t watch this anymore. I can’t, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Anna,” Lambert said. “Tell us about the Duroc.”
“Right . . .” She went to the table and paged through a folder, then selected a file. “Here. I haven’t had any luck tracing an owner, but based on the data Sam downloaded from the helm console, I know where she came from: Port St. Lucie, Florida. Shouldn’t take too long to narrow down a list.”
A phone on the table trilled. Lambert picked it up, listened for a few minutes, then replaced the receiver. “Good call on the Bahamian fire bands, Sam. Twenty minutes ago the local police found nine bodies inside a burned-out coffee warehouse outside Freeport City. We should have preliminary autopsy results in a few hours.”
“That explains what happened to the Trego’s crew, but not how the Duroc got involved. The one prisoner we’ve got is Middle Eastern and I’m betting those nine bodies will be, too.”
“The question is,” Grimsdottir asked, “why were they picked up, then executed by a yacht full of Chinese? What’s the connection?” Nearby, her computer workstation chimed. She walked to it, sat down, and studied the screen for a few moments. “Gotchya,” she muttered.
“Got what?” Lambert asked.
“Remember the virus from the Trego laptop? Well, I knew its cod
e was unique—the work of a pro. It took a while, but our database found him: Marcus Greenhorn.”
“Please tell me you know where he is,” Lambert said.
“I’ll do even better than that, Colonel. I’ll give you his room number.”
16
WHILE Sam had never heard of Marcus Greenhorn, both Grimsdottir and Lambert assured him Greenhorn was as dangerous as any terrorist—so much so he’d earned himself a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
A mathematical prodigy who graduated from high school at age seven, from Princeton at ten, and MIT at fourteen, Marcus Greenhorn, now twenty-two, had at the age of eighteen nearly handed a nuclear weapon over to Iranian-backed Hamas extremists, having used his cyber-wizardry to hack into the Air Force’s security grid and steal access codes to the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex in New Mexico, home to a plethora of nuclear warheads, including the W56 Minuteman II and the W84 GLCM, or Ground Launched Cruise Missile.
Brilliant as he was, Greenhorn fell victim to a pedestrian flaw—greed. After collecting his half-million-dollar advance from Hamas, Greenhorn had turned around and tried to extort the U.S. government, promising to turn over details of Hamas’s planned raid on Kirtland for two million dollars. While Greenhorn’s skills were impressive, they weren’t a match for the full and focused effort of the National Security Agency, which tracked the extortion demand back to Greenhorn, extracted the details of the Hamas raid from his computer, then proceeded to wipe clean the Swiss account he’d set up for his early retirement.
Broke, on the run, and hiding from his disgruntled Hamas customers, Greenhorn had gone underground and become a cyber-mercenary.
Since that incident, the authorities had kept Greenhorn’s former friends and compatriots under electronic surveillance, but to no avail. Until now.
“This virus he wrote for the Trego laptop is pure Greenhorn,” Grimsdottir said, “but with a twist—a bit of security code he’s used once too often. I took the code and turned the mainframe loose on all the e-mails we’ve intercepted from Greenhorn’s old friends. We got a hit.”
“Explain,” said Lambert.
“We ran the same encryption protocols in Greenhorn’s virus through all the e-mail intercepts. It seems one of Greenhorn’s ex-girlfriends has been getting love letters—all disguised as spam: mortgage offers, discount pharmacies . . . the usual stuff. Well, yesterday this woman got an e-mail from Greenhorn. Decrypted, it read, ‘Ticket waiting for you at airport. Meet me, Burj al Arab. Champaign and caviar.’ ”
“Where’s Burj al Arab?” Lambert asked.
Fisher answered. “Not where—what. The Burj al Arab is a hotel—probably the most luxurious resort on the planet. It’s in Dubai.”
Lambert squinted at him. “How do you know this?”
Fisher shrugged, offered a half smile. “Guy’s got to vacation somewhere, doesn’t he?”
“Well, consider yourself on vacation. Bring me back a souvenir.”
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
THE taxi pulled over and Fisher paid the driver and climbed out. Though in mission prep he’d read every piece of literature and memorized every drawing and schematic, seeing the Burj al Arab in person took his breath away, as did the heat, which, despite it not yet being noon, had risen to ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
Sitting on a palm-lined, artificial island a quarter mile offshore, the hotel was connected to the mainland by a raised two-lane bridge bordered by high guardrails and secured at each end by a gate manned by a pair of armed guards. At sixty stories and 1,053 feet, the curved, stark white Burj al Arab was not only the tallest hotel in the world, but also the most lavish, featuring a six-hundred-foot-tall atrium, a helipad, a rooftop tennis court, suites with more square footage than the average person’s home, personal butlers, and chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces.
Designed by its architects to resemble a giant, wind-filled sail, the hotel’s impact was dramatic, both at a distance and up close. Taking it in, Fisher’s eyes and brain were momentarily tricked into believing they were watching a clipper ship gliding into port.
And a security system second to none, Fisher thought, snapping off a photograph. He wasn’t alone in his gawking. Dozens of tourists stood at the head of the bridge shooting pictures over the heads of the smiling, white-shirted guards. The Burj al Arab’s reputation as a prime Middle Eastern tourist attraction made Fisher’s surveillance much easier.
While he’d been in the air, Grimsdottir had been doing her own reconnaissance, albeit of the cyber variety. According to the Burj al Arab’s mainframe intranet, Marcus Greenhorn was staying in the three-thousand-square-foot, six-thousand-dollar-per-night penthouse suite. And he wasn’t alone. Aside from his girlfriend, who had arrived the previous day, Greenhorn was being attended by no less than five bodyguards supplied by the Emir himself and drawn from the ranks of UAE special forces troops known as Al-Mughaaweer, or “The Raiders.”
This told Fisher two things: One, whoever Greenhorn was working for had unparalleled influence in the Middle East; and two, his own penetration of the Burj al Arab had just become an even tougher proposition.
He checked his watch. Three hours till nightfall.
THE lack of security boats patrolling the waters around the hotel spoke volumes about either the security staff’s laziness, or its confidence in the internal security system. Fisher assumed the latter, and this was backed up by his final call to the Situation Room.
“I’ve download the hotel’s blueprints and schematics to your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir said. “I’m not going to lie to you, Sam, it’s ugly.”
“Define ugly.”
“Redundancies upon redundancies. I’m hacked into their security grid, but in most cases I’ll only be able to bypass alarms and sensors for twenty seconds before backup systems kick in. When I say ‘move,’ you’ll have to move fast. When I say ‘freeze,’ you’ll have to freeze.”
“I’m at your command.”
Lambert said, “Sam, I’ve confirmed your equipment drop. Just follow the GPS marker and dive straight down.”
Given the nature of the target, he and Lambert had agreed a typical insertion method was a nonstarter. The hotel was kept under watch by a nearby Naval radar station, which meant any air approach would draw the attention of UAE fighter-interceptors. Even without that complication, Fisher wasn’t confident about parachuting in. The winds around the hotel were volatile and the rooftop small. If he missed the target, he’d find himself in a one-thousand-foot free fall.
That left only one option: underwater. To that end, earlier that day the CIA’s deputy station chief in the Dubai consulate had been sent on a fishing trip up the coast from the Burj al Arab, where he’d dropped a weighted duffel containing Fisher’s equipment load-out.
“How far down?”
“Twenty-five feet, give or take. Nothing for you.”
Years earlier Fisher had taken up open-ocean free-diving, in which divers hold their breath and plunge to depths ranging from one hundred to four hundred feet. Initially attracted to the sport by simple curiosity, Fisher had immediately found himself hooked by not only the physical challenges—which were substantial—but also the mental ones. Free-diving was the ultimate test of one’s ability to focus the mind and control fear.
“It’s never the dive, Colonel, it’s the ascent.”
Getting in was only half the battle; getting out, the other half.
17
AN hour after the sun dropped below the horizon, Fisher left his hotel and took a taxi to Dubai’s nightclub district, where he got out and strolled around until certain he hadn’t been followed. Then, following his mental map, he walked two blocks west to the shore. A quick check with his mini-NV monocular showed no one on the beach. He walked to the tide line.
To his left, a mile away, the Burj al Arab was ablaze, lit from within by amber light and from without by strategically placed green floodlights shining up against the snow-white exterior. As designed, it looked like the mas
sive, glowing sail of a clipper ship resting on the ocean’s surface. On the rooftop, Fisher could see ant-sized tennis players scurring back and forth under the glare of stadium lights. The sky was clear, but the stars were dulled by the pollution of nearby refineries and wells.
He checked his watch’s built-in GPS readout: He was where he needed to be.
He took a final look around, then sprinted ahead, and dove into an oncoming wave.
FOLLOWING the GPS, he reached the correct spot after only a few minutes’ swimming. He took a breath, flipped himself into a pike dive, and kicked to the bottom. The coordinates were dead on. As he neared the bottom, a pulsing red strobe emerged from the gloom. He reached out. His hand touched rubber.
He stipped off his civilian clothes, under which he was wearing his tac-suit, then, working from feel alone, he unzipped the duffel and found the rebreather’s face mask. He placed it over his face and tightened the straps until he felt it seal on his skin, then pressed the bleed valve and blew out a lungful of air, clearing the mask. He sucked in a breath. He heard a hiss, which was quickly followed by a bitter taste on his tongue as the rebreather’s chemical scrubber started working. He felt the flow of cool oxygen entering his mouth.
Next came the rebreather’s harness, his fins, and weight belt. Finally, he strapped the OPSAT to his wrist, the pistol to his leg, and slid the SC-20 into its back-holster.
He clicked on his face mask’s task light, and was surrounded by a bubble of soft red light. He clicked it off, then keyed his subdermal. “Comm check.”
“Read you loud and clear, Sam,” said Grimsdottir.
“Heading to insertion point.”
AFTER twenty minutes, Fisher’s first indication he was nearing his target was the sound—a distant roar and a low-frequency rumble in his belly. He checked the OPSAT’s readout: four hundred yards to go.
