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Ramvik, Norway
THE YOUNG MAN muted the phone and gave Olan Ramm a wicked grin.
“Zhang, finally?” Ramm demanded. He was a blond, emaciated man with a cadaverous face.
When the young man spoke he sounded like British gentry. “He’s only three minutes late. He’s all done.”
“Then we are all done,” Ramm said, feeling almost euphoric.
“All done. All in place. Nothing left to do except make some phone calls,” the young British man said.
“Let’s make them, then,” Ramm said.
The young man unmuted his telephone.
Qingdao, China
“THE PROBLEM SEEMS to have righted itself. Thanks so much for your services, Mr. Zhang.”
Zhang saw the connection get cut. The screen went dead. And Zhang knew he had made a very bad mistake. He grabbed the control handle on the MK-8 and started the motor. It pulled him away from the Northern Aurora at full speed. Which wasn’t going to be fast enough.
Ramvik, Norway
IT WAS 4:03 P.M. in Northeastern Vermont.
It was 9:03 p.m. in London.
It was 5:03 a.m. in Qingdao, China.
It was 10:03 p.m. in Ramvik when Olan Ramm made the most anticipated phone call of his life.
CHAPTER FOUR
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
He was a powerful-looking man, even confined to a wheelchair. Aaron Kurtzman was the top cybernetics expert at Stony Man Farm, and as such he was tapped into a dizzying array of electronic intelligence feeds. His fingers moved deftly over a wireless keyboard.
One of those feeds had just beeped at him. He had hundreds of alerts programmed into the system, but this one he recognized.
So did the Japanese man at a nearby terminal. The alert had played over his earbuds, interrupting the music. “Oh, no,” groaned Akira Tokaido. “It’s an MUA.”
Multiple Unresponsive Aircraft was their internal acronym for the alert.
Their dynamic search routines assessed all the data coming into the Farm, looking for patterns, any sign of trouble. Any unresponsive aircraft could signal trouble, but the truth was that aircraft went unresponsive every day. A bad radio, a storm, a flight crew in an animated discussion about yesterday’s game—anything could cause an aircraft to be unresponsive for a little while. Stony Man Farm’s MUA alert didn’t trigger when just one aircraft went unresponsive somewhere in the world.
But when there were several at once, it demanded immediate attention. If they’d only been able to track MUAs in 2001….
“Airbus out of Heathrow, en route to New Delhi,” Kurtzman said out loud as he sped through the feeds highlighted by the alert. “Cargo flight out of Heathrow to Istanbul.”
“Cargo flight, LHR to MOW,” Tokaido announced. LHR was Heathrow, MOW was Moscow. “Passenger, LHR to CPT.”
CPT was Cape Town. And again out of Heathrow. Somebody had just exploited a huge hole in Heathrow security….
“Passenger!” Tokaido blurted. “CDG to SXM!”
It took an extra second for that to register. Vacationers to St. Maarten—out of Paris. Kurtzman felt sick. Then his own screen showed him a new window. Passenger. MIA-GIG.
“Miami!” he shouted. “That’s a GPS tracking beacon response failure.”
Kurtzman wished every aircraft on the planet was equipped with a device like that, constantly transmitting its exact location. The truth was, most aircraft had beacons that didn’t go off until there was trouble. And sometimes the trouble happened too fast for the technology to activate.
The phone shrilled at Kurtzman’s elbow and at the same time a new alarm went off on his screen.
And then another.
“Aaron?” Barbara Price was on the phone. “Are you seeing what’s happening in China?”
“China?”
He scanned the next alert. It reported a large-scale oil pipeline break. His brain tried to play catch-up. Multiple aircraft—and then an oil pipeline?
“What the hell is that?” demanded Tokaido, now standing at Kurtzman’s shoulder and stabbing a finger at a list of numbers on the screen.
“I wrote this routine. Why the hell don’t I get what it’s showing?” Tokaido liked his world of iron-fisted cybernetics control. There was nothing worse than when one of his own apps went rogue.
“No,” Kurtzman said. “It’s working.”
“Then what is that?” There were six items on the screen. Then there were seven.
“Pipeline breaches. Each is a different one.”
Tokaido glared at the computer. Of course he had programmed the thing to display multiple catastrophic oil pipeline breaches, should they ever happen simultaneously.
He’d just never dreamed it would actually happen.
“Talk to me, Aaron,” Price snapped. “I’m on my way. Do you see what’s happening in China or not?”
“Everywhere but,” Kurtzman said grimly.
Washington, D.C.
THE SUNNY AFTERNOON turned dark.
“Jesus!”
Hal Brognola was in his office when he heard the expletive issued out in the hall. It reached him through two closed doors. Now somebody was running. Now somebody was sobbing.
The big Fed in the big office overlooking the Potomac felt his stomach churn as he snatched up the remote and stabbed the power button.
“—ruptured and exploded. We’re trying to get out but it’s moving fast.”
It looked like a small-time TV newscast. The title at the bottom of the screen read, Live in Shambert: Protesters Want Mayor Dubin’s Resignation.
What was on the screen was nothing as mundane as a protest against a local politician. The cameraman was trying to keep the image steady as the news reporter steered the van through black smoke.
“We heard the snaps and then we saw it coming down the hill. It didn’t take but a minute. Every building in the town’s on fire. We must’ve seen twenty people just get drenched in it. They’re still burning. No way to get to them. We’re trying to get out. Look at that!”
The camera swung to look out of the front windshield and for a moment there was the image of a street. Hundreds of gallons of black oil channeled between burning buildings and flooded through the streets. Running people scattered, but not fast enough. The burning oil tide swept over them. The camera caught the image of a woman twisting and staggering until the belching smoke masked her.
“Not getting out this way!” The reporter slammed the van into Reverse and whipped it around and into a side street.
And the image vanished. “We’re getting word from Houston of another oil fire, this one at an oil terminal station...”
The big Fed grabbed at the phone to make a call, but it was ringing when he touched it. It was the Stony Man Farm mission controller, Barbara Price.
“We need to shut down airspace, Hal.”
Brognola scowled. “Airspace? This some sort of aerial attack?”
He heard Price use a word that Barbara Price didn’t often use. Then there was a rush of words in the background. It was Kurtzman.
“Hal,” Price said calmly but firmly. “We have several incidents under way.”
“Top priority?” Brognola demanded. He could hear the urgency in her voice; there was no time for a debriefing. He was going to have trust her judgment—and he did.
“We’ve got many unresponsive aircraft alarms in the last few minutes. Half of them are out of Heathrow. Others are over Brazil, Africa, the Atlantic—”
“I thought the MUA alert system wasn’t supposed to work that well?” Brognola demanded, almost defensively. His mind was spinning.
“It’s working better than we had hoped, unfortunately,” Barbara Price said. “Six ELTs have activated, matching the MUAs. But only we know about it, Hal—because of the MUA alerts. Global air traffic control doesn’t yet see how widespread this emergency is. We need a global alert. We need airspace shut down. If we can get one more aircraft out of the sky before it’s attacked...”
“I’m on it.”
Brognola snatched up a second phone and dialed the President himself.
“Yes, sir. Right now our number-one concern is the aircraft. We believe at least six aircraft around the world have been downed. Yes, sir, some are passenger jets…. We don’t know.”
There was a pause.
“We don’t know. We can’t wait for the aviation authorities around the world to make these connections themselves. This attack is still going on.”
But even as he said it, Brognola wondered if it was true. The muted TV was showing a rotating series of nightmare images. Burning land. Burning people. Burning ships. Had everything really burst into flames simultaneously? If so, was the attack done?
The President hung up. He would make calls. Personally. He would ensure that warnings were spread around the world within minutes. Commercial aircraft would be lining up to land all over the planet. Air force patrols would take to the air by the thousands, looking for signs of attacking or suspicious aircraft. The response would be worldwide and as instantaneous as any global mobilization could possibly be.
Brognola looked at the clock.
It was 4:26 p.m.
The shadows were growing longer in D.C.
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
AKIRA TOKAIDO’S BASIC skill set was in computer hacking, and right now he was tearing open digital security walls with all the finesse of a belligerent fifteen-year-old. It was somewhat amazing to watch his process. He would stare into one monitor, pull up a new attack report, then pound the keys in front of him, opening government and commercial systems with equal speed and ease, dismantling their firewalls in minutes, digesting the intelligence inside in search of anything that would help. He’d then dismiss it and move on to the next attack report.
So far, he’d come up with nothing. Neither had Carmen Delahunt nor Huntington Wethers, two other members of Kurtzman’s cyberteam. They were tearing through report after report in the Computer Room, looking for any electronic signature, any puzzle piece, any clue.
Barbara Price was doing what she could to simply organize what they knew so far.
The sheer number of the attacks was staggering. Pipelines all around the world. Oil tankers on every ocean. Aircraft—at least one on each inhabited continent.
She brought up the live video feed from China. It had been the first attack report that she had seen, and only because she had been watching a live news feed from BBC Asia, almost at random. They had news crews in Qingdao—at a hotel on the bay, in fact. It was the sudden bright light, not the noise, that had roused one of the news crew, who’d promptly set up a camera at the window of his hotel room and begun taping the burning of Jiaozhou Bay.
The Northern Aurora, which had been sitting there, waiting for some paperwork to go through so it could off-load a million barrels of crude oil, had burst into flame in the predawn night.
The BBC replayed its first minutes of footage and Price paused the playback herself. The massive oil tanker was a black hulk in the black night, but six gaping holes were open in its side, exuding orange flames that were licking off of spilling oil. The holes had been spaced with a precision that was unsettling.
“Easy,” sneered Tokaido, looking at the video on the well-mounted video screen. “You could put them there with a rowboat.”
He was glaring at the screen, his eyes glinting. The young Japanese hacker looked—what? Enraged?
Tokaido had been with Stony Man Farm for several years. He had seen much. Why, Price wondered, was he taking this one so personally?
Or was that just her imagination?
Tokaido abruptly thrust his finger at the frozen image of the tanker on the huge plasma screen.
“Fucker!” he snarled.
The way that Tokaido went back to his computer, Price thought he was going to start pounding the keys with his fists.
Wethers, Delahunt and Kurtzman had all stopped what they were doing. Kurtzman met her eyes before he returned to rattling the keys of his own terminal.
Price hit Play and watched the playback from China. The local time code started at 4:06 a.m., the moment the quick-thinking BBC staffer got his camera going. By 4:33 a.m. local time the black hulk of the Northern Aurora had vanished behind a lake of flame. The lake spread. Price watched with horrified fascination as the orange brilliance illuminated the shore and the buildings and then seemed to swallow them up. There were explosions. Ship after ship was being consumed in the flame. At least two more oil tankers were engulfed and burned until they blossomed and added their own fuel to the flames. The voice of the reporter standing behind the camera described the oil spill’s creep along the shore of the bay. Buildings were being set ablaze. Thousands being evacuated from the shoreline as the fire jumped to the buildings and spread inland.
The vivid image of the bay was of half blackness and half conflagration, but the blackness continued to shrink. The fire seemed to have sensed the voyeurs in the hotel and was coming after them.
“We’re leaving the camera,” the reporter said. It was odd, hearing the voices of a bunch of Brits in a hotel room. The oil fire itself was silent.
“Let’s go!” the reporter said a moment later.
Then viewers around the world heard the door to the hotel room open and slam shut. There were no more voices. Just the camera’s unique view of the fire that seemed now to reach to the horizon.
The attacks had happened less than an hour ago. The damage still had a long way to spread.
Over the next twenty minutes the satellite-fed footage of the flames crawling to the hotel was dramatic and terrifying. Then a new kind of smoke appeared in front of the fire. Close-proximity fumes. The hotel itself was finally burning.
CHAPTER FIVE
