Fire Hawk (58 page)

‘That won't be easy, sir. But we do have some new data on the container. The importation from Israel was arranged by a Philadelphia-registered printing company set up one month ago – specifically for this operation, we assume. The listed directors don't appear to exist. There are some indications of Russian-émigré organised crime being behind all this, but we don't have specific names yet.

‘The container was picked up from the port by a regular trucking company this morning, but the driver was under instruction to rendezvous with the client at a truck drop-in on the 1-95 just north of the Baltimore Beltway. A witness there saw him get into a white van. Soon after, the van drove north and another driver took over the truck. The original driver's not been seen again and his mobile phone's been switched off, so we can't get a trace on him.

‘The traffic management cameras in the Baltimore area must have picked the truck up somewhere, but the tapes are still being checked. Unfortunately luck isn't with us today; the recordings for the
eastern
Beltway are incomplete because of a technical failure.'

Luck like that was all they needed, thought Burgess.

‘We don't know whether the truck went north, south, east or west. And state police enquiries about disused barns or industrial sites large enough to conceal the container have yielded nothing so far.' Stobal turned to face his Director. ‘In my opinion, sir, we should get the media involved right now. A public appeal for information could bring us the luck we need.'

‘I agree,' said the Director immediately. ‘Unfortunately the President doesn't. He's still hoping for a miracle. Two
o'clock is what he said. No word to the media until then. For now, we're on our own, folks.'

Burgess looked up from the computer screen, needing a break. He'd been scouring the registry files of known Russian-émigré criminals for some link that the automated search systems might have missed.

They called it ROC in the New York field office where he'd worked until a few weeks ago – Russian Organised Crime. An assembly of letters as deadly as LCN – La Cosa Nostra. Two acronyms spoken in the same respectful breath when crime-busting professionals talked of the transnational organisations they did battle with, organisations whose wealth and influence could turn them into a super-power if they ever managed to combine their criminal forces.

Dean Burgess wished he was back in New York, working on his sources in Brighton Beach.
Somebody
must know of a Russian-émigré organisation stupid enough to get mixed up in an act of war. Only a handful of the ROC gangs in the US operated on a grand scale like the Sicilian ‘families' and the FBI had chopped the head off one of those in 1995 with the arrest of Vyacheslav Ivankov. Over two hundred of the thousands of Mafiya gangs in the former Soviet Union had operations in the USA however, but most used freelance hoodlums here instead of creating permanent gangs. It was their
lack
of a ‘mob' structure that had made them so hard to corral.

He checked the wall clock. Ten after twelve. In twenty minutes Carole would step off the Amtrak from New York with Dean and Patty, expecting him to be there at Union Station. And he wouldn't be. It was impossible to leave the SIOC for the half hour to an hour it would take.

But hell! She'd surely understand why he'd let her down. When it all came out what he'd been involved in, no way was she going to finish with him like she'd threatened. They shouldn't be here at all, that was the trouble. Back home in the safety of Westchester was where he wanted them. Still, he told himself, if they'd been planning a day in Philadelphia he'd be worried a heck of a lot more.

He concentrated on the screen again. Then the phone rang. Security down at the E Street visitors' entrance, telling him Sam Packer had arrived. He asked for a messenger to bring him up to the fifth floor so he could meet him in the elevator lobby. Stobal had given enthusiastic approval to Burgess's overnight initiative, and had arranged a pass for the Englishman to enter the secure spaces of the SIOC.

Sam followed the wiry black security guard out of the elevator. The building, he noted, had that smell common to all American public buildings and motels. A dead, artificial smell, something to do with the air conditioning or with the stuff they used to clean the carpets.

‘Hi! Good to see you!' Burgess was marching towards him along the blue carpeted corridor with his hand outstretched and an attempt at a smile. Sam had forgotten how tall he was. ‘Flight okay?'

‘Wouldn't dare say anything else after the Concorde treatment,' Sam grinned.

‘Good. Can't tell you how glad we are to see you.'

He led the way into the SIOC.

‘Coffee?' Burgess checked, once they were through the security hatches. ‘Or maybe something to eat?'

‘Coffee's fine.'

‘Cream and sugar?'

‘Black, thanks.'

As Burgess tapped menu codes into a drinks dispenser, Sam took in the banks of screens in the operations centre and the couple of dozen heads bent over them. It was like the citadel of a warship, and he felt instantly at home.

Burgess took him into a side room to brief him.

‘Top guess is Philadelphia. The president's date at the Vets stadium tonight has been in the public domain for a couple of weeks at least.'

He spelled out what they knew about the container and the fact that it hadn't yet been found.

‘Surely the President's going to cancel his rally?' Sam asserted.

‘If we don't have that container by mid-afternoon, yes he will. Then we're back to guessing again. First question is will Colonel Hamdan know that the Philadelphia meeting's been terminated?'

‘Yes,' Sam affirmed immediately. ‘He'll find out. This man's thorough.'

‘Our opinion also. So, next guess . . . Will he go for an alternative target?'

‘Again, yes. He won't hang around.' Sam narrowed his eyes. ‘What's going on in Washington today? I saw crowds converging on the Mall.'

‘Pledge for the Family. A right-wing religious outfit. Thousands of born-again men committing themselves to spending more time with their kids,' Burgess explained uncomfortably.

Sam whistled. ‘That's a tempting target,' he stated. ‘Particularly if Hamdan wants to create a frenzy of hatred against Saddam Hussein.'

For a while Burgess just stared at him.

‘I sure as hell wish you hadn't said that,' he murmured eventually.

The barn smelled of decayed animal excrement. In one corner lay the camping mats and sleeping bags the two Iraqis had used during the night, although sleep hadn't come easily to either of them. A cardboard carton still held most of the food Hamdan had bought yesterday but which neither of them had had much stomach for.

They'd both felt greatly relieved at the arrival of the container. Relieved and anxious to get it over with, because the sudden appearance of the huge box in this gossipy corner of nowhere land was tantamount to putting a match to a beacon.

They'd begun work soon after the taciturn Russian-born trailer driver had left, checking first through a split in the barn's walls that nobody was near enough to hear the noises they would soon be making. They'd opened the container doors with trepidation, half expecting it to contain rotting fruit juice or printing equipment. Seeing the dull grey paint of the drone's nose cone, however, they'd smiled at one another and solemnly clashed their fists together in the way they'd done over the candle flame in Hamdan's flat in Baghdad all those weeks ago.

There'd been checks to be made. They'd started up a small petrol-powered generator to produce the current needed for the VR-6 control system. First, Sadoun had tested the firing and guidance circuitry, programming in co-ordinates for the waypoints and for the target itself
which Hamdan had acquired through the use of a handheld GPS plotter. Then Hamdan had walked a couple of hundred metres to a copse of poplars and tried out the disguised VHF transmitter that he would use in a few hours' time to vector the drone's final moments and to trigger the warhead's electro-magnetic shutters.

They'd discovered a glitch in the aileron controls, which Sadoun traced to a loose wire. Then, satisfied with the drone itself, they'd called each other up on their rented cell phones to check they could communicate.

Now they were ready for the final part of the preparation. They stood back from the rust-streaked container and, without looking each other in the eye, donned respirators, easing the rubber over their chins and sucking in air to check the seals were tight against their smoothly shaven skin.

Hamdan entered the container first, ducking under the stubby delta wings of the drone to reach the far end. There, secured against the container wall by an elastic strap, was a dustbin-sized insulated drum. Remarkably, when they lifted the thick polystyrene lid they found the inside still cool from the ice-packs that had been crammed into it in Cyprus. Reaching in with gloved hands Hamdan extracted a metal canister the size of a large vacuum flask. Weighing five kilos and wrapped in transparent polythene, the cylinder contained enough anthrax spores to wipe out the population of a small town.

First, Hamdan checked visually that there'd been no leak from the warhead's seals. Then, satisfied it was intact, he carried it forward to the front of the drone and cut away the plastic wrapping. Between them they installed it into the drone's empty camera bay.

Hamdan stepped down onto the floor of the barn to let Sadoun complete the wiring.

Finally, when the Major was satisfied, he joined Hamdan on the ground and removed his mask.

‘It is done,' he whispered. ‘The weapon is ready for firing, Colonel.'

Dean Burgess watched Iye Stobal's heavily jowled face grow steadily longer as each minute passed with no breakthrough in the hunt for the container. Highway video cameras had detected the truck heading south from Baltimore, then lost it after it turned onto some smaller route. At this stage of the game they badly needed the help of the public – and needed it right now.

The President had cancelled his Philadelphia rally nearly an hour ago and was due to go live on TV and radio in a couple of minutes.

Sam had been assigned a spare terminal in the SIOC and had been reading computer files on Russian-émigré crime in the faint hope he might spot some link with Dima Grimov that Burgess had missed. The Odessa connection dated back to the seventies, Burgess had told him, when a Russian crook named Balagula had migrated from there to Brooklyn. He'd quickly grown rich on gasoline tax evasion and fraud, and spread his tentacles abroad to South Africa and Israel.

Most of the ROC criminals with FBI files had the ruthlessness to be acting for the Voroninskaya gang in America, but discovering which were actually doing so would take up more time than they had. Burgess was
right. What they needed now was the intelligence of the streets – the eyes and ears of Joe Public.

Burgess nudged him. The President's face filled the monitors on the video wall. He was beginning his address to the nation.

‘My fellow Americans . . .'

Never seen him so grim, thought Sam. The familiar face looked in shock, the eyes with none of their usual twinkle.

The country faced a grave threat, he announced solemnly. A terrorist attack with a biological weapon that could make the bomb in Oklahoma City look like a side-show. He was sparse on detail. No names given out, no nationalities identified. A cautious President holding back on public accusations until certain of who to blame and how to retaliate.

‘Until this threat has passed, my security advisers have told me it's prudent if I cancel all my public appearances. My apologies therefore to the people of Philadelphia. We shall not be able to meet at the Vets stadium tonight as scheduled. They are also advising that all other open-air gatherings in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia planned for today and tomorrow should be cancelled. Wherever possible people should remain indoors in their own homes where they will be perfectly safe.'

Up to a point, thought Sam. If the stuff were to get into the air-conditioning ducts of an apartment block . . .

The President kept it brief and to the point, winding up with a promise to keep the nation informed and with a plea for there to be no panic.

‘Let me assure you, this is a situation that our national security agencies are trained to handle. Please co-operate with them to the full. With your help we can put an end to this threat before any harm is done.'

‘Hope he fools some of them,' Burgess muttered, stroking his moustache.

The output of all the main TV networks had combined for the broadcast. Now all channels switched to a briefing room at the Pentagon.

‘Uh-oh!' Burgess exclaimed. ‘The guys in the green uniforms are pulling rank over us Big Bad Feds.' He shook his head. ‘Means the President plans to go to war.'

The screen filled with a picture of a container truck, then dissolved to a map of the Baltimore/Washington area with an appeal for information about any similar vehicles that might have been seen off the main highways.

‘Hey, Dean!'

Jess Bissett called him over. Burgess beckoned Sam to go with him.

‘Jess, Sam. Sam, Jess.'

‘Hi,' Jess smiled just for an instant. ‘Dean, a highway patrol on Route Three, six miles south-west of the junction with ninety-seven, has just picked something up at a roadside eatery. They spoke with a trucker who saw a forty-foot container trailer turning off Route Three a couple of miles north of some place called Clifdene. Said it surprised him because the lane it turned into wasn't much wider than a farm track. They're sending six cars to box the area.'

‘Great!' Burgess spun back to his own terminal to print off a map covering a five-mile radius from Clifdene.