48
Washington, D.C., July 6, 1330 hours
DIRK PITT HAD A
FRONT-ROW SEAT in the Situation Room at the Pentagon. Cameron
Brinks of the NSA was putting on a show. The President wasn’t
there, but his Chief of Staff, military brass from all four
branches, and several members of the cabinet were present. As was
the Vice President of the United States, Dirk Pitt’s former boss,
Admiral James D. Sandecker.
With the bizarre
actions in Sierra Leone over the past few days, followed by the
threats coming from its President, Brinks had totally embraced the
possibility that Sierra Leone was involved in the scientific
kidnappings and the creation of some type of energy
weapon.
How else could they
have the gall to threaten the world and America in particular?
After several days of searching with his satellites, Brinks claimed
to have identified the location of such a weapon, calling it a
clear and present danger.
At the front of the
room, on a screen that was just a fraction smaller than some
Jumbotrons he’d seen, Pitt studied a satellite feed. It showed an
area off the coast of Sierra Leone, a shallow bay ten miles across,
home to an oil production zone known as the Quadrangle because of
its dimensions and the four evenly spaced platforms. On a wide
angle they showed up as four pinpoints of gray. At closer ranges,
those points were easily identifiable as huge offshore oil
rigs.
Other data was being
overlaid on the screen, numbers and codes that Pitt wasn’t familiar
with. In some respects he wondered why he was even there. NUMA was
peripherally involved in the search, but for the most part any
action at this level would be well out of their hands.
With the participants
given a few minutes to review the files in front of them, Dirk
studied what he’d been given a second time. One thing that caught
his attention was the fact that the entire field and the four rigs
were owned by the government of Sierra Leone and always had been,
unlike all the structures taken just days before in the sweeping
nationalization.
Another red flag that
stood out was the fact that oilmen the CIA had spoken with insisted
there was no oil beneath the shelf where the Sierra Leone
government was drilling. It was a boondoggle, they insisted. A
waste of the money the IMF was pouring into the
country.
Add to that the
continued presence of construction barges and constant deliveries
of equipment well after the construction of the platforms was
completed, and something odd seemed to be going on.
Pitt closed the file
in front of him and looked up to see Brinks and Vice President
Sandecker walking his way. They stopped and chatted with the Navy’s
chief of staff before wandering over to where Pitt
sat.
Pitt stood and shook
hands with both men.
“I told you your man
was off on a wild-goose chase, looking for this mercenary,” Brinks
said.
Pitt smiled and his
green eyes showed nothing but pure joy, despite a desire to punch
Brinks right in the mouth.
“I honestly hope
you’re right,” Pitt said. “After all he’s been through, Austin
could use a vacation.”
“Well,” Brinks said
confidently, “we’re about to give him one.”
As Brinks moved off,
Sandecker took a seat next to Pitt.
“Thanks for the
invite,” Pitt said, sarcastically. “It’s like a pool party with
sharks and alligators.”
“You think I wanted
you here?” Sandecker joked. “Brinks dialed you up.”
“Why?”
“Probably wants to
gloat.”
“Nothing like a sore
winner,” Pitt said.
Sandecker agreed. “I
hear you shot him down pretty hard the other day.”
“He was asking for
it,” Pitt said.
The VP chuckled and
leaned back, focusing on the screen. “I bet he was.”
Pitt appreciated
Sandecker’s support. Always had. “You know it’s weird for me to see
you without a cigar in your mouth,” Pitt said.
“No smoking in the
Situation Room,” Sandecker replied. “Now, pipe down and you might
learn something.”
Up front, Cameron
Brinks stood and began his presentation. After explaining what Dirk
had already discovered in the file, he went on to
elaborate.
“I’ll make this as
quick as I can,” he said. “We all know the situation in Sierra
Leone is spiraling. What we didn’t know until now is whether there
was any credence to the threats leveled against us. We now believe,
based on information uncovered by various sources, that there is.
As odd as it sounds, Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in
the world, is now in possession of a weapon of incredible
destructive power.”
Brinks walked to the
side of the room, conferring for a second with an assistant who
seemed to be hooked up to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland,
where the satellite data was coming from.
“In the time since we
put together the files in front of you,” Brinks said, “we’ve
conducted additional satellite passes of the area described in
them. The Quadrangle. The video on the screen is a real-time
scan.”
Brinks looked down,
waited as his assistant tapped a few keys on the computer terminal
in front of him, and then raised a remote control device and
pointed at the screen. With the click of a button, the colors on
the screen changed. False hues illuminated the water, the land, and
features that hadn’t been visible in the earlier shot.
“This is an infrared
scan of the Quadrangle area,” Brinks said.
Pitt looked on. The
area around each oil platform was bathed in a reddish color that
elongated with the tide. It had to be a discharge of some kind, one
that was raising the water temperature around the rigs and slowly
being drawn off by the current. Pollution was his first thought,
leaking oil or distillates of some kind, but then he remembered
that there was no oil in the region.
“The rigs are pumping
heated water,” he said.
Brinks nodded. “Very
good, Mr. Pitt. Each one of these platforms is shipping heated
water out into the Atlantic. Hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of
high-temperature water every day. There can only be one reason for
that: whatever they’re doing requires an immense amount of
cooling.”
“They’re generating
power,” Pitt whispered to Sandecker a few seconds before Brinks
confirmed it.
“The question is,
why?” Brinks said. “The answer is simple: to use in a massive
particle accelerator that they have turned into a
weapon.”
Brinks clicked his
remote control, and the image changed again, adding purple to the
dark blue, gray, and magenta already on the screen. The new
iridescent color ran in a thin line, encircling the four oil
rigs—which were, in fact, spaced miles apart—in a giant loop. Other
thin fingers branched off this loop and stretched out into the
Atlantic. One group went to the west and the northwest, another
group north and northeast, a third group of these thin purple
filaments branched back toward the African continent.
“This loop demarks an
underwater structure that was identified through a combination of
infrared scans and surface-penetrating radar from an Aurora spy
plane. The loop is fifteen miles in diameter,” Brinks said, using a
laser pointer to indicate the circle. “And each of these supposed
oil rigs is just a facade to throw us off. Beneath their structures
are throbbing power plants, each large enough to light a small
city.”
“What kind of power
plants?” someone asked.
“Gas turbine
generators, feeding off a large natural gas pipeline that was built
allegedly to bring gas out of the area. We now know the opposite is
true.”
“And all that power?”
someone else asked.
“Used in the
superconducting electromagnets that accelerate the particles,”
Brinks said, “and the massive cooling system required to keep the
ring at operating temperature.”
Brinks stood back and
explained. “By our calculations, this system is generating and
using twenty times the energy that CERN uses for its Large Hadron
Collider. We can come up with only one explanation for such a power
need. This thing is a weapon. It can probably take down satellites
over Europe, the Atlantic, and Africa of course. It can threaten
shipping in the Atlantic, perhaps as far as a hundred miles out. It
can threaten commercial aircraft in a three-hundred-mile
radius.”
“The weapon can only
fire three hundred miles?” Pitt asked.
“No,” Brinks said.
“It can probably do damage at a much farther range, perhaps even
tens of thousands of miles, but it fires in a straight line like a
laser. It cannot curve around the surface of the earth like a
ballistic missile.”
That made sense, but
something else didn’t.
“What about the
Kinjara Maru?” Pitt asked. “That ship
was nowhere near Sierra Leone when it was hit.”
“No,” Brinks
admitted. “Probably they have a derivative weapon on that submarine
we’re looking for. But that’s a tactical weapon, small potatoes.
This thing is strategic and threatens an entire region. We’ll deal
with this first, the submarine afterward.”
Brinks turned back to
the group. “Our recommendation is that it be taken out in a
surgical airstrike before Djemma can use it against
someone.”
Silence followed that
statement. No one disagreed, not after Djemma Garand’s actions in
the days preceding and his threats, however unspecified, against
the United States.
“Best recommendation
as to method, Mr. Brinks?” Vice President Sandecker
asked.
“Advise we take out
the rigs, Mr. Vice President,” Brinks said. “That’ll effectively
shut off the power. And without power, the particle accelerator is
just a big tunnel with a lot of fancy equipment stored
inside.”
Though Pitt didn’t
like Brinks’s jaunty tone, he calculated the situation similarly. A
threat existed, controlled by a leader who appeared to be unstable.
An airstrike would create minimal destruction, minimal casualties.
The technology would be preserved for study.
Much to Pitt’s
dislike, he had to agree with Brinks’s assessment.
“I’ll relay your
recommendation to the President,” Sandecker said, then
stood.
Meetings like this
didn’t often last long. And even if it was going to continue, the
VP had seen enough.
But before he could
leave, something odd happened to the screen at the front of the
room. The colors shifted for a second and then bled, like something
was interfering with the signal.
All eyes focused on
it.
Brinks looked to his
assistant. “What’s going on?”
The assistant was
tapping away at a laptop. He looked up, shaking his
head.
A second later a
flare of white light crossed the screen and then everything went
dark. Static followed and then a blank screen. Text in the bottom
right-hand corner indicated complete signal loss.
Brinks looked
embarrassed. “Get on the horn and find out what happened to the
feed.”
“The line’s clean,”
the assistant said. “The signal’s coming through fine. It’s just
not carrying any data.”
Pitt had been
watching something odd on the screen right before it flared. He
doubted anyone else had noticed as the VP was leaving. When
Sandecker stood, everyone else stood, Pitt as well, but he’d never
taken his eyes off the screen.
That allowed him to
see a number indicating heat output from the oil platforms suddenly
rising. It had climbed rapidly, like an odometer rolling over. A
new area of red and magenta had appeared over one of the angled
filaments. It had been visible for only a second, but Pitt was
fairly certain he knew what it was.
Somewhere in Fort
Meade the techs probably knew too; they just were too stunned to
say so until they’d checked every other possibility.
“The problem’s not
the computer,” Pitt announced. “It’s your satellite.”
All eyes turned to
him.
“Really?” Brinks
said. “And when did you become an expert in remote imaging
diagnostics?”
“I’m not,” Pitt said.
“But play the last five seconds back. You’ll see an energy spike
right before the image flared. They fried your satellite, Brinks.
It’s gone.”
Brinks looked over at
his assistant. “We’re trying to reestablish a link,” he
said.
“Forget it,” Pitt
told him. “You’re calling up a dead bird.”
“Switch to Keyhole
Bravo,” Brinks said, referencing the backup satellite that was
orbiting at a different angle and higher altitude.
Brinks’s assistant
finished his last desperate act of tapping and looked up. There was
nothing to say.
“Two satellites
gone,” Sandecker said. “That’s a damn act of war.”
Everyone in the room
grew more somber at that realization.
“I figured you’d be
happy,” Pitt said to Brinks. “This proves your theory. Djemma
Garand is dangerous, his weapon is operational, and he’s not afraid
to use it. Even I agree with you now. He has to be taken
out.”