58
DJEMMA GARAND STOOD
in the control room of his grand project, fifteen stories above the
sea. He was well aware that his game of brinksmanship with the
Americans had reached a critical point. He had already destroyed
two of their satellites and declared the space over Africa
off-limits to the spy craft of any nation, but the latest news from
his military commanders suggested the game would be played without
limits.
“There is an American
carrier fleet two hundred miles off our shore,” one of them told
him. “Our main radar has detected at least twenty-four aircraft
inbound.”
“What about
submarines?” he asked.
“Nothing yet,” the
commander of his naval forces replied. “The Americans are known to
be very quiet, but once they enter the shallows we will hear them
and we will pounce.”
This was as he’d
expected.
“Raise the torpedo
nets,” he said. “And surface the emitter.”
Beneath the platform,
his patrol boats started their noisy engines and raced outward
toward the mouth of the bay. Meanwhile, his helicopters, loaded
with antisubmarine missiles, rose from the platforms of the
Quadrangle.
It was good to see,
but they’d be nothing but target practice for the Americans if the
energy weapon itself didn’t work.
A mile in front of
platform number 4, a long sloping ramp began to rise out of the
water like a massive serpent come to life. It climbed until it
stood three hundred feet above the waves, the telescoping towers
locking into place like stanchions beneath a bridge.
A long tube lay
cradled in the center of the ramp, and at its head was a half
circle filled with his superconductors that could direct the
particle stream in any direction.
“Emitter online,
power levels ninety-four percent,” one of his technicians called
out.
Nearby, Cochrane
studied the readout. He nodded his agreement. “All indicators
online.”
“Missiles inbound,”
his radar operator reported. “Six from the south, ten coming from
due west. Eight from the northwest.”
“Engage the particle
beam,” he said. “Destroy them.”
Switches were thrown,
and a computer coding program initiated. The powerful radar systems
he’d bought were online, picking up the American missiles, tracking
and targeting them. The fire control system went on
automatic.
The battle was joined
at last.
Djemma knew the odds
were long. To win he would have to beat back the American attack
and then hit them hard on their own land. To succeed he would have
to accomplish what no country had managed to achieve in almost two
hundred fifty years: he would have to force the Americans to back
down.
As he considered this
multiple explosions lit the dark horizon, and Djemma Garand knew he
had drawn first blood.
SEVERAL THOUSAND
MILES AWAY in the Pentagon’s Situation Room, the same group that
had gathered twelve hours before watched and waited as the attack
on Sierra Leone unfolded in real time.
Dirk Pitt couldn’t
remember a feeling so tense, perhaps because the events were beyond
his control at this point, perhaps because at least two of his
people, Paul and Gamay, were out there in it.
After two flights of
Tomahawks had been destroyed and a radar-jamming aircraft had been
destroyed as soon as it got into position, a second wave of attacks
had been initiated.
On-screen, Pitt
watched as icons representing a squadron of F-18 Hornets approached
the coast of Sierra Leone from different directions. The aircraft
were converging on an imaginary line, the Event Horizon. It was
believed the particle beam weapon could incinerate anything that
crossed beyond that line, but they couldn’t grant Djemma free reign
without testing it first.
A few miles from the
line, the Hornets released a flight of Harpoon missiles, the Navy’s
fastest nonballistic weapon. By attacking from different angles at
the same time, they hoped to overwhelm the system’s capacity to
respond, but as one missile after another stopped reporting
telemetry Pitt began to sense the failure of step two.
At the bottom of the
large screen, video from an onboard camera recorded the flight of a
missile approaching from the south. Three other missiles were ahead
of it by various distances, all of them deliberately traveling on
slightly different courses.
In the distance an
explosion appeared well to the left of the missile. It began as a
flash, and then a cloud, and then a burning arc of rocket fuel
igniting spread across the frame. Seconds later, two similar
explosions followed, ahead and to the right this time. And then a
flare in the lens and nothing but static and a black
screen.
“What happened?”
Brinks demanded, though everyone certainly knew.
“The missiles are
gone,” one of the telemetry operators said.
Radio calls in the
background confirmed that the pilots were seeing the same thing.
And then all of a sudden one pilot radioed with
trouble.
“Experiencing control failure—”
The signal
cut.
A second pilot
reported something similar, and then his signal went
dead.
“Large explosions, bearing one-five-five,” a third
pilot said. “We have two, maybe three aircraft
down—”
The squadron
commander cut in. “Drop to the deck, pull
back.”
Before his orders
could be followed, two more signals were lost. And moments later he
confirmed five aircraft down.
“Apparently, we drew the damn line in the wrong
place,” he said.
With a red face, and
veins popping out on his neck, Brinks looked as if his head might
explode. A sense of unease crept over everyone else in the room as
well.
The submarines would
move next, along with an end run attempted by Dirk’s two civilians.
But this attack would happen in slow motion.
As they waited an
aide came into the room and spoke with Vice President Sandecker. He
passed a note.
Sandecker looked up,
concerned anew.
“What is it?” Brinks
asked.
“Contact from
Moscow,” Sandecker said.
“Moscow?” Pitt
asked.
Sandecker nodded.
“They’re claiming to have just uncovered information suggesting
that Washington, D.C., is about to be attacked. The threat comes in
the form of a particle beam weapon. Apparently, the same one we’ve
just failed to destroy. They insist that the intelligence is highly
credible and that the threat is valid. They urge we do everything
possible to defend or evacuate.”
“What in the name of
. . .” Brinks began.
Sandecker looked up.
“If the information’s accurate, the attack will come within the
next ten minutes.”
“Ten
minutes?”
“Nice of them to get
us a warning so early,” someone else grumbled.
“We can’t evacuate
the city in ten minutes,” someone said. “We couldn’t do it in ten
hours.”
“Emergency Broadcast
System,” someone else said. “Urge everyone into shelter. Basements,
underground garages, the Metro. If this is true, people will be
safer in those places.”
Brinks shook his
head. “If this is true,” he said
sarcastically. “This is a joke. And if we start crying that the sky
is falling, a thousand people will die in the panic for nothing.
Which is probably just what they want, along with our citizens
worrying whether we can protect them or not.”
“What if we can’t
protect them?” Pitt asked. “Are we just going to let them die in
their happy ignorance?”
Brinks squirmed.
“Look,” he said. “Garand may have taken this round, but there’s no
way they can hit us here. Every one of our experts concludes that.
Their weapon fires in a line of sight. It simply cannot hit
anything over the horizon. Even the F-18s were safe, once they
dropped back a few miles.”
The Vice President
looked around. “Anyone have anything to add? Now’s the time if you
do.”
There was silence for
a moment, and then another staffer from the NSA spoke up, a slight
man with frameless glasses. “There is one possibility,” he
said.
“Spit it out,”
Sandecker ordered.
“Particle beams are
aimed and directed through the use of magnets,” the man explained.
“One study concluded that an extremely powerful magnetic field
placed along the target line could bend a particle stream,
redirecting it onto a new target. In essence, giving it the ability
to shoot around corners.”
Pitt didn’t like the
sound of that. He stepped forward, though it wasn’t really his
place. “What would it take to hit us here?”
The man straightened
his glasses and cleared his throat. “The power output of a small
city channeled into a vigorous magnetic array of some
type.”
“Where would this
magnetic array have to be?” Pitt asked.
The man didn’t
hesitate. “It would have to be located roughly halfway between the
weapons emitter and the target.”
That made the threat
seem less likely. There weren’t any islands out there, certainly no
place big enough to generate the kind of power this man was talking
about. Then again . . .
Pitt turned to the
Pentagon staffer who was operating the tactical display. “Widen the
screen to show the entire Atlantic,” he demanded.
No one objected, and
the task was accomplished in two quick strokes of the
keyboard.
On the big screen the
familiar profile of the American East Coast appeared on the
left-hand side. Africa and Western Europe took their places on the
right.
The battle group and
the Quadrangle continued to be marked by a series of tiny icons in
the lower right-hand side, just under the bulge of West
Africa.
“Show me the location
of the Liberian tanker Onyx,” Pitt
said. “Based on Kurt Austin’s last report.”
It took a few seconds
and then a new icon appeared in a blue tint, one so pale it looked
almost white. A tiny flag next to it read “Onyx:
Liberia.”
Dirk Pitt stared at
the icon along with everyone else in the Situation
Room.
It sat almost dead
center of the screen, exactly halfway between the Quadrangle off
the coast of Sierra Leone and the city of Washington,
D.C.
“My God,” Sandecker
said. “When do our submarines attack?”
The Navy’s attaché
answered. “Thirty minutes just to get in range. They won’t be able
to stop it.”
With that, Sandecker
sprung into action, grabbing the aide.
“Get the President to
the bunker,” he said. “Order an immediate alert on the Emergency
Broadcast System. Contact all law enforcement and emergency
services personnel and the power companies. Tell them to have their
people take cover and be ready for an emergency shutdown. We’re
going to need them to get this place back up and running if this
happens.”
As Sandecker spoke to
the aide, a brigadier general from the Air Force was on a phone to
Andrews, passing the word and ordering a scramble. Other people
around the room were giving similar commands, in person or over
phone lines. The normally quiet Situation Room suddenly resembled a
busy telemarketing center or a Wall Street trading
pit.
Pitt grabbed his own
cell phone and sent an emergency text that would reach all NUMA
personnel in the vicinity. He called the office to follow
up.
For his part, Brinks
looked stricken, fumbling with a cell phone, trying to call his
wife. Dirk understood that; he was thankful that his wife, Loren,
and his children, Summer and Dirk Jr., were on the West Coast this
week or he’d have been doing the same frantic dance.
Brinks hung up and
wandered unsteadily over to Pitt, of all people.
“Voice mail,” he said
as if in a trance. “What a time to get voice mail.”
“Keep trying,” Pitt
told him. “Ring that phone off the hook.”
Brinks nodded but
continued to act as if he’d been drugged. The shock had stunned him
into inaction.
He looked at Pitt
through starry eyes. “Did your man get on that ship?” he asked
quietly.
Pitt nodded. “As far
as I know.”
Brinks swallowed,
perhaps his pride. “I guess he’s our only hope now.”
Dirk nodded. One man
on a tanker in the middle of the Atlantic now held the fate of
thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in his hands.