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“Got it,” Hannigan cried, stepping back.
As he dropped a circuit board into the wooden box, there came the low hiss of working pneumatics and the middle section of the cylinder cycled up to reveal seven large spheres nestled inside the complex machinery, their smooth surfaces glistening with condensation. It took a moment before the mercs realized the white objects were not truly spheres, but some sort of decahedron, or more properly, a dodecahedron, the curved sides made of a smooth array of a hundred interlocking pyramids.
“Whew, so that’s them, eh?” Barrowman said, scratching his arm inside the sling. “Kind of hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
“Not really, no,” Lindquist replied, feeling his heart quicken at the sight. The spy at Mystery Mountain had informed him that the Skyfire weapon system possessed multiple warheads, but he had expected to find two thermobaric bombs, not seven. This windfall once again changed his plans.
Shifting gears to take a hill, Kessler looked at the spheres in the rearview mirror. “What kind of a yield are we talking about here?”
“Close to the order of a kiloton of TNT,” Lindquist answered absentmindedly, his thoughts elsewhere.
“Are you serious?” Kessler gasped. “But that Chinese nuke we used on the dam only had a quarter-kiloton yield.”
“Then this would be more,” Johansen said with a tolerant smile.
“Four times more powerful than a tactical nuke,” Barrowman muttered. It was incredible. One of those spheres could flatten Manhattan. The cluster would burn all of New York City, from Brooklyn to the Bronx, clean off the map.
“Pity we’re not selling them on the black market,” he said impulsively. “We’d be millionaires overnight.”
“Billionaires, more likely,” Lindquist corrected.
The mercenaries exchanged glances, but said nothing.
“How much farther to the tunnel?” Johansen asked, licking her lips.
“We should be there any minute now,” Lindquist answered.
“There she blows!” Kessler announced, taking a curve in the road.
Directly ahead of the truck was a wall of dark rock, impossible to climb or traverse. But smack in the middle was a small tunnel, the mouth just barely large enough for the huge Soviet truck to gain entry.
As they entered the tunnel, the truck headlights illuminated the interior for hundreds of feet. The pavement was old, but the smooth concrete walls were spotlessly clean, without any trace of diesel fumes or car exhaust, almost as if the tunnel was brand-new.
Or very rarely ever used, Lindquist mentally corrected himself. Only the top brass at the Kremlin ever used the secret tunnel, and not even the nosy Americans knew of its existence.
But almost instantly, Kessler downshifted and started to brake. “There’s roadwork up ahead,” he added in a suspicious voice.
Craning their necks to see through the windshield, the Foxfire team scowled at the sight of a van parked in the middle of the roadway, the headlights beating to the rhythm of the idling engine. Surrounded by a ring of bright yellow cones, a team of workmen wearing bright orange safety jackets and carrying shovels seemed to be doing something to the pavement. There were several tanker trucks on the far side of the construction zone, the drivers standing outside their rigs smoking cigarettes.
Braking to a halt, Kessler pumped the gas pedal a few times to stop the engine dieseling. At first it did not seem to work, then the engine went still and a heavy silence blanketed the highway.
“Okay, we do this by the numbers,” Lindquist said, pulling out a 9 mm automatic Tokarev and working the slide. “Everybody stay here, and I’ll go see what’s happening.”
“We got your six, sir,” Johansen stated, pulling the Carl Gustav launcher onto her lap.
Tucking the Soviet automatic into a pocket, Lindquist opened the side door and stepped down to the roadway. “Hello,” he called, waving a hand. “What’s the trouble?”
“Water main broken,” a slim man shouted in a heavy accent, checking something on a clipboard.
“Can we get past?” Lindquist asked, walking over casually. Then he suddenly dived to the side.
Instantly the workers dropped their clipboards and shovels to bring up Red Army 30 mm grenade launchers and fire a salvo at the Soviet truck.
“What the… It’s a trap!” Kessler bellowed, frantically trying to start the engine while the barrage of canisters impacted around the truck, gushing out thick volumes of a bilious green smoke.
“Gas attack,” Johansen cursed, grabbing a gas mask from under a seat.
Everybody else did the same as the rising fumes seeped into the truck, swirling around their boots. Breathing deeply as they had been taught, the mercenaries now grabbed weapons, but a terrible wave of nausea overtook each of them. The strength flowed from their limbs like water down a drain. Their fingers turned numb, breathing became impossible, then they went blind. Foaming at the mouths, the Foxfire team dropped twitching to the floor, and went very still.
Staying safely where they were located, the workers waited for several minutes until the ventilation system of the tunnel cleared away the fumes of the deadly gas.
With a bang, the rear doors of the truck slammed open and out stepped a skeletal thin man wearing the crisp uniform of a Soviet Union admiral. There was a Tokarev automatic holstered at his stomach, the grip reversed for a left-handed man. A nylon cord connected the pistol to his belt in case it was dropped when at sea. He appeared to be much older than he actually was and his teeth were clearly false, but the bony man still possessed a full head of wavy hair and radiated authority the way a furnace does heat.
“Report please, Sergeant,” commanded Brigadier General Ivan Alexander Novostk, both hands held behind his back. A smooth red scar crossed his throat from ear to ear where a Soviet Union paratrooper had tried to remove his head and failed at the cost of his own life. General “Iron Ivan” Novostk considered himself unkillable. His body was covered with scars from a hundred battles, hard fought and won. His long career in the Slovakian military was burned into living flesh, and most of the scars were a constant reminder of the brutality of the Kremlin and its monstrous lapdogs, the KGB, forever renewing his unquenchable hatred of the Communists.
“The air is reading clear, sir,” Sergeant Petrova Melori announced in Slovakian, checking the monitor of a chemical sensor.
Rising to his feet, Lindquist dusted off his pants. “Two of you make sure they’re dead,” he directed in the same language. “The rest of you clear away these cones. The entire Russian army will soon be here, and we better be long gone.”
“You heard the colonel!” a corporal bellowed, slinging the grenade launcher over a shoulder. “Kleinova, Louvsky, check the bodies and watch for traps. Everybody else, clear the way.”
As the soldiers got busy, Lindquist walked over to the skinny man. “Good to see you again, sir,” he said with a genuine smile.
“And you, Colonel,” General Novostk replied, offering the man a hand. “How many T-bombs did we get?”
“Seven,” Colonel Lindquist replied, drawing the Norinco automatic and tossing it away. “More than enough to get the job done.”
“Excellent! I am more than pleased.”
Damn well hope so. But the colonel said nothing out loud.
A sharp whistle came from the Soviet truck and a soldier waved. “They’re dead, sir,” he shouted through cupped hands.
“You sure?” Lindquist demanded, brushing back his hair.
There came the sound of four individual pistol shots.
“Yes, sir,” the private replied. “We’re sure.”
Good enough. “Well done, Private.”
After transferring the seven angular spheres to the van and strapping them down, the soldiers threw the box of spare parts across the tunnel and left.
“To enhance the appearance of an internal explosion,” Colonel Lindquist said to the sergeant. If the general did not agree, he kept the matter to himself.
Satisfied for the moment, Lindquist drove away in the van, the soldiers easily running beside the slow-moving vehicle until it reached the other end of the tunnel. Idling there was a titanic Mi-6 Hook, the largest helicopter in the world.
The van was guided up the rear ramp into the Hook, where the soldiers lashed it securely into position. Then they took seats along the walls and put on their seat belts. This promised to be a bumpy ride. Lindquist and Melori went to the flight deck for their seats, and strapped in tight.
As they did, the pilot revved the power to full strength, and the nearly overloaded Mi-6 Hook lifted off.
As the tunnel dwindled below, Sergeant Melori waited until he was sure the cargo helicopter had reached a safe distance, then activated a small radio detonator and pressed the button.
The range was too great for them to feel the shock wave of the explosion. But from their great height, the two officers saw volcanoes of flame erupt from both ends of the tunnel. The fire raged unchecked until the steel support beams began to soften and the mouth of the tunnel melted shut.
“I wish them luck getting those open soon,” Melori stated, tucking away the detonator.
“What did you use?” Lindquist asked, watching the white-hot flames recede until they were only a pair of bright points in the darkness, then only a single point, and then the natural contour of the landscape took them from sight.
“Rocket fuel,” the sergeant replied.
Saying nothing, Lindquist tilted his head in disbelief.
“No, it’s true, my friend.” General Novostk chuckled. “Those tankers contained liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. We used the same mixture as the Americans do for their space shuttle. Two parts liquid oxygen and one part liquid hydrogen. Add some diesel fuel from the engines, and the mixture burns almost as hot as a thermobaric bomb.”
“Almost. But not quite.”
The general shrugged. “No, not quite. However, it should take them days to figure that out. And by then…” He grinned.
Colonel Lindquist understood. Soon enough, the whole world would have other things to worry about than the deaths of some thieves. Then he frowned.
“Were the tankers stolen?” the colonel demanded. From bitter experience, the man knew that hijacked trucks were easily traced, and this needed to resemble an accidental triggering of the Skyfire device, not a clever way of destroying any trace of forensic evidence.
“No, they were supplied by a dummy company owned by your employer in the Ukraine.” General Novostk laughed. “On paper, they never existed, and thus cannot go missing, eh?” Then he pretended to punch the officer in the arm. “Do not worry, my American friend. Every detail has been considered and taken care of. We are quite safe. Nobody will ever know who we really are.”
Angling away from the spreading umbrella of hard radiation tainting the clouds over the remote valley, the Soviet Union cargo helicopter moved low and fast over the rugged terrain, heading due south, out over the Black Sea.
CHAPTER TWO
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“Just a few minutes ago, we caught another heat flash,” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman said, turning his wheelchair away from his computer workstation to pour himself a cup of coffee. “At first we thought it was a second nuke, but this wasn’t hot enough, and the chemical signature more resembled a space shuttle launch.”
“Have the Russians put something into space?” Barbara Price demanded, her stomach tightening.
Without adding milk or sugar, Kurtzman took a long draft of the steaming coffee as if it was tap water. “No, we don’t think so,” the Stony Man computer genius replied carefully, setting the mug into a recess on the armrest of his chair. “If the blast had occurred out in the open, that might have been a possibility. This actually seemed to be two simultaneous explosions exactly where the CIA believes there is a hidden tunnel.”
A tunnel? The Farm’s mission controller frowned. “Okay, something exploded inside, and the blast came out the ends,” Price rationalized, crossing her arms. “Could it have been the Red Army dealing with the thieves?”
“Or vice versa,” Carmen Delahunt announced from her console. Perched on the edge of her chair, the redhead was focused on her computer screen. Dangling from the back of her chair an S&W Bulldog revolver was tucked into an FBI-style shoulder holster.
“Explain that,” Price demanded.
“According to the NATO Watchdog satellite we hijacked, there were isotonic traces of diesel fuel in the chemical signature of the explosion,” Delahunt said. “Along with similar amounts of vulcanized rubber.”
“That sounds like a truck,” Price said slowly, testing the words.
“Three trucks, by my calculations,” Delahunt answered.
“Insulated trucks,” added Akira Tokaido, removing his earbuds. “There was far too much cobalt in the signature to come from anything other than heat-resistant steel.” Tokaido was of mixed Japanese-American ancestry. He seemed born to operate computers, code coming to him as easily as breathing to ordinary people.
“Maybe there was a tank, or an APC caught in the blast,” Price offered hesitantly.
“I wish that was true, but no,” Kurtzman countered, sliding his wheelchair under his console. “Russian military contains natural wood fibers to make the metal more elastic, and thus proof to most armor-piercing rounds.”
Wood fiber in tank armor? “Are you positive?” Price scowled.
Tokaido gave a curt nod. “The spectrum analysis is conclusive. No military vehicles were involved in the blast. So unless whatever was stolen detonated while suspended in liquid boron, or something equally outrageously exotic like that…”
“Then the explosion was caused by insulated tanker trucks carrying liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Clearly, it was a trick by the thieves to try to fake their own deaths,” Huntington Wethers said, removing an old briar pipe from his mouth. “Unfortunately, it also tells us what was stolen.”
Tall and distinguished-looking, Wethers seemed to be the epitome of a college professor with wings of silvery hair at his temples, a briar pipe and leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. Although fully tenured at Berkeley University, the man had felt a strong need to serve his country, and left the world of academia to become one of the most feared cyberhunters in existence.
Thoughtfully, Price chewed a lip. An explosion powerful enough to be mistaken for a tactical nuke, but without any radiation. The only thing that came to mind was… Oh hell, not that. “What was the last weapon tested there?” Price demanded, trying to stay calm. If what she thought had just happened, the world was in for a long hard rain of blood and pain.
“Difficult to say,” Delahunt answered. “The master computers of Mystery Mountain are not connected to the Internet, and the entire valley is covered with a camouflage net so that our Keyhole and Watchdog satellites can’t see what was happening down there.”
“However, the only logical extrapolation is that the thieves stole one of the new Russian thermobaric bombs,” Tokaido interjected.
“Now, LOX and LOH don’t quite burn as hot as one of those,” Kurtzman stated, cracking his knuckles. “But pretty damn close.”
Several decades ago, the Pentagon had started a program to create an arsenal of nonnuclear weapons, and the cream of the crop was the FAE bomb, or Fuel-Air Explosive, nicknamed Skyfire. The idea was simple, as all good ideas are. Imagine closing all of the doors and windows in a house, then turning on the gas oven but turning off the pilot. In only a few minutes, the house would be completely filled with highly explosive gas. Now stuff an ordinary fuse under the front door and light it. When the fuse reaches the interior, the house would thunderously detonate, obliterating the entire structure and quite often the homes alongside.
The FAE bomb did the same thing, but out in the open. A plane would drop the bomb and it would burst open, sending out a huge cloud of flammable gas, the exact composition of which was not known to even Stony Man. A split second later, the plummeting canister would explode, igniting the cloud, and a fiery implosion of unimaginable power would blanket the sky, uprooting forests, knocking over homes and office buildings and setting fire to everything within range. The one limiting factor was that a FAE bomb would not work if there were strong winds, or if it was raining, snowing, or even if there was heavy fog. It had to be a clear, calm day.
In spite of colossal efforts, no other nation had ever been able to duplicate the American trick of making a fuel-air explosion work. But a few months ago rumors had surfaced in the intelligence community that the Russians had not only figured out how to make an FAE but had also gone even further. They called their weapon a thermobaric bomb, and it worked exactly like an American FAE bomb, except it could function in high winds, rain, snow or fog. There were no operational limitations on a T-bomb, and if true, it was the most deadly weapon in existence. For all intents and purposes, it was a nuclear bomb that did not give off hard radiation—a clean nuke.
“Is there anything in space?” Price asked, walking closer to the wall screens, her hands clenched into tight fists. “Have the Russians created a new…I don’t know, some sort of a new plasma weapon and it’s running wild?”
“Space is clear,” Delahunt intoned.
Damn. “Do we have any video from the valley? Security cameras or such?”
“Not after a nuclear explosion,” Kurtzman scoffed, drinking from the old cracked mug. “The EMP blast of the nuke erased all of the electronic records.”
Which was probably deliberately done by the thieves, Price realized dourly. It would be very hard for the FSB to track down the thieves if they knew absolutely nothing about them. The nuke destroyed the base, along with any video, then the tanker trucks in the tunnel faked the death of the thieves and vaporized any physical evidence. Whoever took the weapon was smart. Too damn smart, in her opinion.
Deep in thought, Price started to pace. Personally, she hoped that China had stolen the damn thing. At least with them, the United Nations could exert political and economic pressure to not use the weapon. If a terrorist group got their hands on a T-bomb they would immediately use it to destroy a major city—New York, London, Tokyo. The death toll would be in the millions.
“Okay, if somebody has stolen a T-bomb, then how do we track the thing?” Price demanded. “There must be remote telemetry or a lowjack on the thing.”
“Which anybody with an EM scanner could find and remove,” Tokaido stated, studying the monitor on his console. The screen was flashing through road maps of the Russian countryside. A flatbed had been seen by a NATO spy satellite amid the wreckage left by the tidal wave from the destroyed dam. If the bomb was particularly heavy, then it could only be hauled over specific roads. Unfortunately, most of the logging roads in the mountains connected with railroads, and those went everywhere in Russia.
Grudgingly, Price accepted that. “Okay, what about dogs or chemical sensors?” She rallied. “We can tune every one at every major airport to look for just T-bombs.”
“Sorry, no can do,” Kurtzman stated bluntly, placing aside his empty mug. “Hell, Barb, we don’t even know what the damn thing looks like, much less how it works.”
Chewing a lip, Price tried to find some way to approach the problem, but was coming up with nothing. The Russian superweapon was practically invisible. Nobody would know it had been smuggled into Washington until the Pentagon vanished in a fiery implosion that also ripped the White House from its very foundation.
