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 n
ormally 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.
59
ABOARD THE ONYX, Kurt ran and fired and ran again. He emptied his second magazine, loaded another, and kept moving, pushing Katarina ahead of him.
Clear of pursuers for a second, they ducked into an alcove between two of the ship’s storerooms and listened.
Some kind of strange alarm had begun sounding. It almost resembled the Whoop, Whoop heard on a submarine before it was about to dive.
“What’s that?” Katarina asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Seconds later a recorded voice came over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Fulcrum deploying. Stand clear of midships array. Repeat. Stand clear of midships array.”
“We’re running out of time,” Katarina said. “Can’t be more than a couple minutes left.”
“And we’re going the wrong way,” Kurt said.
They’d had no choice, each pack of crewmen they’d run into had forced a detour. Since they’d left the cabin, they’d actually moved farther forward instead of aft.
In their favor, the ship was mammoth yet crewed by no more than a hundred or so. Some of those had to be at duty stations to pull off whatever Andras was doing with this Fulcrum array. And at least six were now dead.
Working against them was the ship’s architecture. The Fulcrum compartment was between them and the coolant room at the aft end of the ship. Since the Fulcrum took up the top half of the ship, and ran from beam to beam, the only way to get past it was to go deep into the ship and use one of the bottom decks to cross under it.
The alarm and recording continued, and Kurt imagined the giant fan-shaped array, larger than a football field, emerging through huge doors on the top of the Onyx’s hull.
“Let’s go,” he said, pulling Katarina up and getting on the move once again.
She was struggling to keep up but had yet to make the slightest complaint.
Kurt found a ladder that dropped through a hole in the deck. He took it, sliding down with his feet on the outside rails.
“Come on,” he said. As Katarina came down the ladder he noticed the rag around her hand was soaked right through in red.
He went to look at it.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Keep going.”
Another ladder dropped them down a few feet to one more deck. And this time, Kurt stopped. He could hear machinery throbbing in an odd pattern, on, off, and back on.
It gave him an idea.
“Wait here,” he said.
Kurt crept forward. Markings on a pair of closed hatchway doors read “Thruster Unit.”
Behind him, Katarina leaned against the wall and slid down it in slow motion.
“I’m okay,” she said as he started back toward her. “Just . . . taking . . . a little rest.”
She wasn’t going to make it much farther. At least not running through the ship at breakneck speed. And they were running out of time anyway.
The Whoop, Whoop alarm stopped, and even down in the bowels of the ship the hull shuddered slightly as something big locked into place.
“How much time?” he asked.
“A minute,” she said through her exhaustion. “Maybe less.”
She slumped onto her side, the blood-soaked rag over her hand smearing blood across the metal deck.
He couldn’t help her now. He had to do something about the Fulcrum before it was too late. With a fire ax he pulled from a bracket on the wall, he broke open the lock on the door in front of him. The sound of throbbing machinery echoed throughout the room.
He stepped inside. Down below were the powerful electric motors of the bow thrusters. By the way the system was acting, it was struggling to keep the ship in some kind of perfect alignment.
Kurt guessed that redirecting a particle beam would require exact precision. If he could stop the thrusters, or throw them off, that might ruin either the beam’s cohesiveness or its aim.
OFF THE COAST OF SIERRA LEONE, Djemma Garand studied the field of battle from his vantage point in the control room of platform number 4. He had forced the Americans back. Twice he had repelled their assaults. Now he would strike with a vengeance.
“Bring all units back to full power!”
Cochrane was beside him, looking nothing like a man who was about to become infamous for all eternity. He looked like a rodent who would rather have scurried under a bush and hid than a man ready to claim his place in history. But he did as he was told, and he had trained Djemma’s other engineers well enough to operate the machinery if he balked.
“All units at a hundred one percent design load,” Cochrane said. “Magnetic tunnels are energized and reading green. The heavy particle mix is stable.”
He looked over at one more screen, a telemetry display from the Onyx. “The Fulcrum array is locked in position,” he said. “You may fire when ready.”
Djemma savored the moment. The Americans had attacked him with missiles and aircraft, and now his sonar readings detected two of their submarines entering the shallows. They were breaking themselves on his strength, and now, as he promised, they would feel his bite.
Once he gave the order, the system would energize. It would take fifteen seconds for the charge to build up in the tunnels of his massive accelerator, and a quarter of a second later the energy burst would race forth, cross over the Onyx, and be directed down onto Washington, D.C.
For a full minute it would spread across the American capital, panning back and forth and wreaking havoc and destruction.
He looked over at Cochrane. “Initiate and fire,” he said calmly.
IN THE THRUSTER ROOM of the Onyx, Kurt found what he needed: the thick high-voltage lines he’d seen in the reactor room. The blue lines, he thought, remembering the schematic. They were routed through the accelerator and then back to the Fulcrum.
That was his only shot. He stepped toward them, swinging the ax and releasing it at the last instant to avoid being electrocuted when it cut into the cables.
The blade hit, and released a massive shower of sparks. A blinding flash of electricity snapped across the gap like man-made lightning, and the entire ship was plunged into darkness.
Kurt was thrown to the deck by the blast. His face felt burnt. For several seconds the compartment was in absolute darkness. The motors of the bow thrusters rattled loudly and began winding down. Finally, the emergency lights came on, but, to Kurt’s great joy, nothing else seemed to have power.
He hoped it was enough. He hoped it had been done in time.
UP ON THE SHIP’S BRIDGE, Andras stared. The ship had gone black, and in the dark of the night it seemed as if the world had vanished. Seconds later the emergency lights had come on.
At first he feared the array had somehow overloaded the system. He reached forward, tapping at the Fulcrum’s contr
ols and flicking the toggle switch on the side of the unit. He got no response, not even a standby light.
A second later some of the basic systems came back online, and Andras looked around hopefully.
“It’s just the one-twenty line,” one of the engineers said. “The high voltage is still down.” The man was flicking a few switches of his own to no effect. “I have no thrusters, no power to the array. No power to the accelerator.”
Andras leaned forward to check the Fulcrum array visually. It stood there, spread out like the canopy of a giant tree that had somehow sprouted from the center of the ship, but it was dead. Not even the blinking red warning lights were illuminated anymore.
He grabbed the joystick that had raised it into position and fiddled with it for a second, then flung the controller aside with great bitterness.
“Damn you, Austin!” he shouted.
After a moment to reflect he realized that power could be restored. He just needed to make sure Austin wasn’t around to cut it a second time. He grabbed his rifle and checked the safety.
“Get somebody down there to reroute the high-voltage lines,” he ordered. “We’ll try again, once it’s up and running.”
The engineer nodded.
Another man looked over at Andras from the far corner of the bridge. “What do we tell Garand if he calls?”
“Tell him . . . he missed.”
With that, Andras stormed out of the bridge, a single thought burning his mind: Austin must be destroyed.
60
THE TENSION in the Pentagon’s Situation Room had grown as tight as a drum. The proverbial pin dropping would have sounded like a cannon shot.
One of the staffers, with a hand to the earphone of the headset he wore, relayed a message.
“We’re confirming a discharge from the Quadrangle site,” he said. “Continuous discharge . . . Duration at least sixty seconds.”
No one moved. They all stared at the screen and waited for the inevitable. Unlike ballistic missiles with their seventeen-minute approach time, it should have taken only a blink.