Incendiary Dispatch

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

The rugged British commando, leader of one of the deadliest paramilitary units on the planet, was drinking on the job.

Drinking heavily. He upended the bottle and sucked out 500 ml of the brown liquid and kept sucking until the plastic bottle collapsed noisily upon itself. Then he released it into a trash can beside one of the computer desks and savagely twisted the plastic cap off of a second bottle.

The big plasma screen had been replaying news feeds from all over the world for three hours. How many times were they going to show this bloody piece of video? It must have been the tenth time he’d seen it.

But he couldn’t look away.

It was the video from the reporter and his cameraman out of a small station in Casper, Wyoming. They’d driven pretty far out of their way to get some video of a protest staged against the mayor of a little town called Shambert. Protesters didn’t agree with his budgeting priorities.

Then the pipelines blew and a sea of flaming crude oil swamped the town. The reporter and his cameraman had been broadcasting live as they careened wildly through Shambert, trying to find an escape route.

“Get ’em!”

It was already a famous sound bite. It was the cameraman shouting as a group of young men staggered into the streets, faces covered by their shirts from the already acrid smoke. For a second, you thought the cameraman was telling the reporter to just run the young men down to get out of town faster.

But the reporter was stomping on the brakes and the cameraman was shouting again. “We gotta get ’em!”

The cameraman screamed out the window. The young men piled into the news van. They screeched away—but maybe the reporter and cameraman shouldn’t have been Good Samaritans. Maybe they shouldn’t have taken those precious seconds to pick up those young men. Maybe they could have saved themselves, at least, if they’d had a few extra seconds to spare.

There was one way out of town left to them, and the oil was already advancing. The reporter tried to drive through the wall of flame. He had no other option. And he did manage to make it through. He reached the other side of the fire. But the van became drenched in burning oil. The men inside were shouting. It was mayhem.

Thank God the news network stopped the tape before the shouting turned to screaming. Once those men started screaming, the camera had continued to operate for eleven seconds. It sent eleven seconds of live video and audio around the world to millions of viewers. A lot of people had listened to those five men die.

The big Brit with the bottle had seen some seriously bad things in his life, but he never again wanted to hear the screaming of the men in that news van as they burned.

There was a different tape now and some female reporter was running down the latest list of attack sites. It just went on and on.

“What is that?”

Carl Lyons was there, staring at the Brit’s freshly opened bottle. It was red and sported a bright white logo in Arabic.

David McCarter waved the bottle dismissively. “Egyptian Coca-Cola. Carl, do we have anything to go on?”

“Not yet. They’re tearing it up back there.” Lyons nodded back into the depths of the Farm. McCarter understood what he meant—the cybernetics team ripping through the systems of the world in search of clues.

“What about arrests?”

“I just got here three minutes ago. I don’t know a thing.”

McCarter shook his head miserably. “How’s Pol?”

“Been better,” Rosario “Politician” Blancanales answered, trying not to limp when he came into the War Room.

“You been cleared by the doc?” Lyons demanded. “I thought you were on bed rest for another forty-eight hours.”

Blancanales’s attention was engaged for a moment by the bottle in McCarter’s hand, then he said. “I’m good to go. We got a target?”

“No,” Lyons replied. He wasn’t fooled for a second by Blancanales’s evasive response.

Blancanales’s circulatory system had been severely compromised. At the little hospital in Georgia, they had pumped every pint of compatible blood in the medical center into Blancanales before his skin began to resume something like its normal color—Lyons never would have thought Blancanales’s Hispanic complexion could have gone as pale as it had been when they’d first run him into that little E.R. They’d performed a quick, temporary stitch-up job to close the wound. Hours later, Blancanales had been transported to a larger hospital in Atlanta, where a surgeon sliced out a thin millimeter of dead flesh on either side of the wound, along with the blackened particles of burned material that had cut into him.

Blancanales hadn’t even noticed it—the moment when he was cut open by an orange-hot fragment of flying debris in the bowels of Solon Labs.

Lyons and Schwarz had fled the explosions deep into the lab and found themselves surrounded in flames. Blancanales rendezvoused with them there, in the biggest lab, where all kinds of equipment and materials were igniting, burning, melting and bursting. Something had exploded and Blancanales got in the way of a piece of shrapnel that burned through his armor, his clothing and his skin.

Blancanales was herding Lyons and Schwarz out of the building as the building burned around them. Blancanales hadn’t even realized he was losing critical quantities of blood out of the sizzling gash in his side.

“Barb—” McCarter said as the mission controller entered the War Room.

“We should have everybody on-site in twenty minutes,” she announced. “We’ll debrief then.” She looked at Blancanales. “Didn’t know you’d received medical clearance, Rosario.”

“All this is looking a lot like what we saw at the lab,” Blancanales said, waving at the big plasma screen and images of burning. Pipelines. Harbors. Ships. People.

“It does, on the surface,” she agreed.

“What about below the surface?”

Price shook her head slightly. “We just don’t know.”

* * *

THE TIME CODE on the screen read 7:35 p.m.

The War Room hosted a full house. David McCarter’s Phoenix Force teammates were present. The three members of Able Team were there.

Aaron Kurtzman was there with the Stony Many Farm cyberteam. Carmen Delahunt, a vivacious redhead, was a talented analyst. Huntington Wethers, a dignified black man, every inch the UCLA cybernetics professor that he had once been. And there was Akira Tokaido, the Japanese hacker. The man was snapping at the touchscreen on a tablet computer, looking as grim as anyone had ever seen him.

Hal Brognola was on the screen from his office in Washington, D.C. Barbara Price, as mission controller, was the one that everybody started unloading on.

“First things first,” Price said. “We’re going to go through a list of incidents.” She looked around at the gathering of faces. “It’s a long one.”

And indeed it was.

“Thirty major pipelines are out of commission,” Price said. “In nearly all cases, the sabotage occurred in semiremote areas where the explosive devices could be, we assume, placed in advance. It’s also clear that some locations were chosen for their geography—the places where the oil flow and fire could do the most damage.”

“Like in Wyoming,” said Hal Brognola.

“Yes,” Price said. “Like in Wyoming. We’re still receiving information from around the world, but there appears to be a standard approach to the sabotage. A series of small explosive devices were placed along the pipelines in advance, where they waited for a signal to detonate.”

“Does anyone have one of those devices?” Brognola said.

“As far as we know, most of the oil fires continue to burn and no investigation teams have been able to get to the scene of any of the actual explosions.”

“What about Alaska?” Brognola demanded.

“No.” Price looked at the screen. Video pickups shifted automatically even when Brognola’s image moved from one screen to another. “The pipeline attacks followed certain patterns, from what we can tell. The explosives detonated simultaneously—maybe as many as twenty to thirty small explosions at once. More in some cases.

“The pipeline in Wyoming was opened up at approximately thirty-four locations over a distance of two miles. The oil spilled out under the pipeline pressure. There are block valve stations on the line that responded to the pressure drop automatically and immediately shut down oil flow. However, at least fifteen of the explosions took place uphill of the station that is supposed to protect the town in case of a pipeline breach. The next station shut down the pipe, but the volume of oil remaining in the pipelines was considerable and was gravity-fed into the town. Gravity-fed oil flow from punctures on the east and the west of the town fed the fires on the town limits and trapped the population inside.”