“I don’t know.”
“You tell me how she survived the fall?”
“Well, that’s easier. Depends on the drop and how deep and hard the snow is. Hell, during World War II the Russians ran out of parachutes and used to put soldiers inside bales of hay and throw ’em out of airplanes so they’d land in the snow.”
“Where’d you read that?”
“In high school. Was the only cool part in the whole book.”
Fisher exhaled in disgust.
“No worries now, Sam. Screw her. We got Kasperov. The Kremlin will take care of her for us.”
“Unless she’s gone rogue. Then anything’s possible.” Fisher swore and shook his head. “I hate loose ends.”
* * *
ONCE they’d left the airport and reached their cruising speed and altitude of Mach 0.74 and thirty-four thousand feet, respectively, Kasperov asked that he and his girlfriend be allowed to rest. They’d barely slept since fleeing Moscow, and while he’d agreed to another conversation with the president, for the time being he needed a meal and a few hours to close his eyes without that constant twitch of fear in the back of his mind.
Fisher and Grim agreed to Kasperov’s request, allowing the man and his girlfriend to sleep in the infirmary. His bodyguards remained outside, where Kobin found a new hobby in harassing them.
While Charlie and Grim continued their intel gathering and assessment, Briggs worked in the armory, cleaning and prepping weapons.
Fisher took a moment to drag Kobin away from his new bestest buddies. “You still in touch with your guy in Lima?”
“He’s looking for payment now. Maybe you can help me grease his palm?”
“Electronic transfer okay?” asked Fisher.
“I’m sure it is.”
“Tell him he’s still on our tab. Got a Russian agent, probably heading out through Juliaca. Need confirmation that she left. Maybe he can help track her.”
“This the Snow Maiden Charlie’s been talking about?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard she’s a real ball breaker.”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And Kobin?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re still alive.”
“Wow, Fisher. You’re gonna make me cry.”
“Yeah, in pain, if you don’t shut up. Call your guy. Get me what I need.”
* * *
THE trip back from Peru to Virginia would take over eight hours, and Kasperov did not rise from his slumber for nearly six. Once he was rested and ready, he asked his girlfriend to leave the infirmary so that he, Fisher, and Grim could have a private conversation with the president, whose face glowed from a nearby monitor.
“All right, Mr. Kasperov. I’ll be blunt,” Caldwell began. “A hundred pounds of weapons-grade uranium is stolen from Mayak. Not long after, you suddenly flee your country. Is there a connection? What’re you running from?”
“I need assurances, guarantees that you’ll keep me and my family safe—because what I will tell you will get me killed.”
“You have my word. And behind me is the greatest military machine the world has ever known. What else do you need?”
“Trust. And can you put price on that?”
“No. But you can let us earn yours. What do you have for us?”
“It’s not Treskayev,” Kasperov answered quickly. “I know him. He’s good man, supported by you and your government. But they’ve put gun to his head.”
“Who?” asked Caldwell.
“Men . . . men like me. I have only opinion, no proof, so no actionable intel as you say. But I know who they are. Perov, the arms manufacturer; Yanayev, the aerospace mogul; and Kargin, the investment banker. Mostly ex-KGB, Yeltsin’s drinking buddies back in ’93. When he busted up state financial apparatus, they got special consideration. Now they buy American sports teams, hunt for American wives, and put big pressure on Treskayev. There are more, but these three are troika that lead all others.”
“What do they want?” Fisher asked.
Kasperov snorted. “What all men want: money . . . power. They’ve secretly won sympathy of prime minister, and he’s recruited many of deputy prime ministers, and they in turn have won over federal ministers. Right now, America stands in their way. Their plan is to weaken your government and undermine your economy, and they would do so in three stages. I was to be first stage.”
“Let me guess: a computer virus attack against the United States,” Grim concluded.
Kasperov nodded slowly. “We call it ‘Calamity Jane.’”
“And it attacks our banking system,” said Caldwell.
“Much more than that. It renders GPS systems useless by exploiting systemic problem with cryptographic keying scheme.”
“That’s impossible,” said Grim. “The GPS control segment is encrypted and uses top secret algorithms. It’s managed from five redundant, high-security, and very hard to reach ground stations all over the world. The master control station is in Colorado Springs, with a backup at Vandenberg. You guys can’t get into their systems. No way.”
“Calamity Jane takes all of that into account. It brings down banking system. It exploits vulnerabilities in military computer systems, and it interferes with GPS. Even Chinese have nothing like it. And more you try to kill it, more powerful it becomes.”
President Caldwell closed her eyes, bracing for impact. “How much time do we have?”
“You’ve misunderstood,” said Kasperov. “I refused to release it. That’s why I ran. They asked me to construct it, assured me it would be nothing more than deterrent, and I even convinced myself that creating it would help me to write best software to combat such virus. Keep your enemies close, right?”
“Yeah, but you had to suspect something,” said Fisher. “You had to know that one day, they’d ask you to use it.”
Kasperov pursed his lips and shook the hair out of his eyes. “Maybe in more limited way and on much smaller scale. I always assumed that ruining America’s economy would ruin Russia’s. Conventional wisdom no longer true for oligarchs. They will take risk and break world’s dependence on your economy. They say clean break is only way.”
“So they came to you, gave you the orders to throw the switch, and you told them to screw off and bolted,” said Fisher. “But why the loud exit?”
“I wanted to go quietly, but I knew my people would suffer. I wanted to give them time for escape. I couldn’t just leave them with nothing.”
“Can the Kremlin gain access to the virus?” Grim asked emphatically.
“No,” said Kasperov. “There is no way.”
“Are you willing to turn it over to us?” asked Caldwell.
“Absolutely not. Men should not wield such power.”
“Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you started banging in your code,” said Fisher.
“Maybe so.”
“You said their plan has three stages. If you’re out, can they still go through with the other two?” asked Grim.
“I would think so.”
Grim’s tone grew more demanding. “And what are they?”
“First, some important background. One of my company’s more recent projects involves hardening thorium reactor control computers against cyber attack.”
“Thorium . . . is that a nuclear material?” asked Fisher.
Grim had already pulled it up on her tablet computer and read from the screen. “It’s a fissile material that can be used for nuclear fuel. They call thorium reactors the ‘clean reactors.’ The stuff is a lot safer to work with than uranium or plutonium but pretty toxic nonetheless, especially if you get it into your lungs.”
“That’s right,” said Kasperov. “Well, we receive
d pressure from government to limit scope of our research—for political reasons, of course. There’s a lot of money at stake here, so I began small investigation, trying to understand why Kremlin wasn’t supporting my work.”
“And what did you find?” Fisher asked.
“It was quite simple. Once hundreds of thorium reactors in Europe go online, Europeans will eventually become fossil fuel independent—and this will destroy Russia customer base. I had no idea my work would help undermine Russian economy.”
Grim frowned. “But how does that involve us?”
“I’ll tell you how,” Caldwell interjected. “We just struck a deal to sell our current stockpiles of thorium to Europe, along with moving out some material belonging to France and India. The buyers were lining up.”
“Yes, I know all about that,” said Kasperov. “And I know that oligarchs are not happy about sale.”
“Exactly how unhappy are they?” asked Fisher, sensing where this was going.
Kasperov hesitated. “Unhappy enough to make sure your thorium never reaches destination.”
Grim’s tone grew urgent. “Madame President, you said we just struck a deal. What’s the status of the thorium?”
“Final approval on the sales occurred last week. I assume it’s being prepared for shipment.”
Grim bolted out of her chair and went charging across the room, toward the hatch.
Fisher glanced to Kasperov. “Come with me!”
26
CHARLIE was calling out to Grim as Fisher and Kasperov arrived in the control center:
“Just got a huge hit on our old friend Rahmani from Bolivia.”
“It has to wait, Charlie!”
“All right, but—”
“Listen, right now we need to get into hazmat transport out of Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Ghost truck fleet. We need direct access to their command center in Albuquerque. I need to know if they’re currently shipping any thorium.”
“Did you say thorium?” Charlie looked at her for a moment, letting that sink in.
“Charlie!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it!”
“I’ll help him get access,” said President Caldwell, her image coming up on one of the control center’s big screens.
“I’ll assist,” said Briggs, rushing into the room and dropping into a computer station.
In the meantime, Grim stared determinedly at the SMI’s screen. She brought up a 378-page Oak Ridge National Lab report on the thorium stockpile in Nevada, and Fisher scanned a bar graph over her shoulder.
There were 3,500 tons of thorium stored in 21,585 metal drums. Each drum weighed an average of 330 pounds. The United States owned 18,924 drums of monolithic material, India had 760 of granulated pebbles, and France had 1,901 of dry powder all stored at the same site, buried in the side of a mountain.
Not a second after reading that, Grim typed in a request, and a wireframe representation of a tractor trailer began rotating on the screen, with data scrolling beside it:
A twenty-foot-long truck could hold approximately 120 drums. This was assuming no pallets, the drums packed into shipping containers. A tri-axel slider chassis could carry up to 44,000 pounds on U.S. roads. The 120 drums would have a total weight of approximately 40,000 pounds.
Over 800,000 hazmat shipments hit the roads every day, and all were highly regulated by the government. There were even classified routes across the United States for the transfer of such materials, with attempts made to keep them away from large population centers, but that was often impossible. The most recent map glowed beside Grim’s truck; however, when the government wanted to ship something highly classified such as nuclear materials, weapons, or other such top secret military technology, there was no map to be found, no record of the shipment. They’d call upon a “black” or “ghost fleet” of trucks whose drivers would not answer to their civilian employers but be directed by the government operators themselves. No other entities save for the government could track them or communicate with them. The dispatchers at their respective companies would be aware that drivers were on the road and transporting “something,” but no other information would be available.
Ghost fleet cabs were fitted with custom composite armor and lightweight armored glass, as well as redundant communications systems with dashboard panic buttons. The comms were part of a Qualcomm-like fleet management computer wired directly into the truck’s data bus. The command centers could monitor and track a vehicle’s GPS coordinates, get readings from the dashboard instrumentation, and engage in encrypted communications directly with the driver via an in-cab keyboard. Drivers or command center managers had the ability to disable the truck via traditional means such as shutting off the fuel supply and by the recent adoption of flux compression generators so the vehicle could not be moved or opened, its electronics permanently disabled by a localized electromagnetic pulse wave. Drivers had nicknamed that switch the “PON-R,” pronounced “pone-ar” and meaning “point of no return,” a familiar term also used by aviators to reference a point where their fuel level would no longer allow them to return to the airfield.
In addition to the sophisticated kill switches, the trucks were designed to defend themselves with concealable Metal Storm robotic 40mm guns that could quickly deliver massive barrages of suppressing fire over a large area.
From the outside, though, you’d never know they were anything but your run-of-the-mill haulers, with standard diamond-shaped warning placards and labels, and painted with their company logos. Even the small comm domes atop their cabs were a common sight on such tractors.
And as expected, sensitive materials were not left in the hands of apprentices. Ghost fleet drivers comprised some of the most experienced haulers on the road, many with over two million miles of hazmat transports under their belts.
The data Fisher continued scanning was merely a refresher course. It was his business to know about the ghost fleet and their operations since hazmat materials were likely targets for terrorist attacks.
“Okay, got it,” said Charlie. “TSMT’s in charge of the shipment. President Caldwell just got me access to the ghost fleet’s network.”
Tri-State Motor Transit was one of a handful of companies that specialized in moving hazardous materials for both civilian clients and government contractors. They had a reputation for having some of the most adept and skillful drivers in the industry—but if their shipments had been compromised, then all the safety training and experience in the world could still fail them.
“Okay, patching through,” Charlie said.
The SMI flashed as a map of the United States blossomed to life, outlines of states glowing in brilliant green with an overlay of cargo routes shimmering in red.
Grim began pointing to the flashing blue dots on the major highways. “Here they are. I count eight, Charlie.”
“Confirm. Eight trucks. They’ve left Nevada and are en route to the Port of Jacksonville, Florida. They’ve scattered the loads, though. Each truck is about eight hours behind the one in front of it, with a few of them taking a more northern route you can see there.”
“Do these trucks have escorts?” Kasperov asked from behind them. “Department of Homeland Security teams or something?”
“No, they don’t travel with escorts,” said Fisher. “Draws too much attention.”
“Mr. Kasperov, you said the oligarchs might attack these shipments,” Grim began. “Do you have anything more specific?”
Kasperov flinched and could not meet Grim’s gaze.
“If they want to take out the entire shipment, they’ll wait until all the trucks reach the port,” said Charlie. “They could blow the cargo ship or even launch an air attack from the shipping yard. Hell, they could already have the shipping yard rigged to blow.”
Grim raised her voice, her tone twice as emphatic. ??
?Mr. Kasperov? Do you know something? If you do, you have to tell us. You realize what’s at stake here, don’t you?”
Fisher stepped over to the man. “We rescued your daughter. You do this for her. You talk.”
Kasperov nodded. “As I said, their plan has three stages. I was to be first. They never told me about other stages. One of my best employees spied on one of them, hacked his computers, and told me about it.”
“Are you talking about Kannonball?” Charlie asked.
“Yes, Patrik Ruggov, Kannonball. He learned about shadow war oligarchs have against your nation. The president was trying to put an end, but they kept on. He learned about teams of Iranians they hired who were smuggled into United States across Mexican border and purchases of large quantities of C-4 explosives from cartels. He told me about many trips to Nevada. He learned that stage two of attack was to be terror and contamination. But again, I never thought they would go through with it. Always a deterrent, a way to threaten Treskayev, manipulate him.”
“Where’s the lead truck now?” asked Fisher.
Grim pointed to the map. “Topeka, Kansas. Looks like it’s nearing exit 361B just south of the North Kansas Avenue Bridge, rolling at sixty-eight miles per hour.”
“So we’ve got some time before all the trucks reach Jacksonville,” said Fisher.
“Maybe not,” said Grim. “I’ll have the SMI generate a blast scenario—because if you think about it, multiple hits on multiple trucks would spread the most terror and contamination. That’s what they’re after.”
“So you think the C-4’s already on board the trucks?” asked Fisher. “They won’t blow them all in Jacksonville?”
“Not enough bang for their buck. I think the shipping containers were rigged before the drums were ever loaded. An inside job with security at the site. Launching an attack along the route requires them to know the route beforehand. Rigging the bombs on a simple timer or via remote detonation’s a lot easier.”
“Jesus, I hope you’re wrong,” said Fisher.
“Me, too,” said Grim. “Because look at this.”