Authors: Matthew Reilly
'It's about time I had some luck,' Race said.
The caimans moved in quickly.
Two big bulls charged in toward the fallen cat and soon the water
around the big animal became a seething, frothing mess.
Race seized the opportunity and leapt across the newly created gap
in the jetty and bolted for the ATV.
As he stepped inside the ATV and Van Lewen slid the heavy steel
door shut behind him, he looked back out at the river through a
narrow rectangular slit in the door.
What he saw was completely unexpected.
He saw the cat—the same black cat that had accosted him only
moments before—-climb slowly up out of the water and back up onto
the jetty. Blood dripped from its claws, ragged chunks of flesh
hung from its jaws, water dripped from its glistening flanks.
The animal's chest heaved. It seemed absolutely
exhausted from the battle it had just fought.
But it was alive.
It had won.
It had just survived an encounter with two bull caimans!
Race slumped down on the floor of the ATV, totally exhausted. He
let his head fall against the cold metal wall behind him and
allowed his eyes to close.
As he did so, however, he heard noises.
He heard the grunts and snorts of the cats outside—close, loud,
large.
He heard their paws splashing in puddles. Heard the crunch of
breaking bones as they feasted on the bodies of the dead German
commandos. He even heard the sound of someone crying out in agony
in the near distance.
Soon Race would fall asleep, but before he did he would have one
final, terrifying thought.
How the hell am I going to get out of here alive?
FOURTH MACHINATION
Tuesday, January 5, 0930 hours
Special Agent John-Paul Demonaco walked slowly down the white-lit
corridor, careful not to step on the bodybags.
It was 9:30 in the morning, January 5, and Demonaco had just
arrived at 3701 North Fairfax Drive in response to an order from
the Director of the FBI himself.
Like the rest of the world, Demonaco knew nothing of the break-in
at DARPA headquarters the day before. All he knew was that the
Director had received a phone call at 3:30 that morning from a
four-star admiral standing in the Oval Office asking for him to
send his best domestic antiterrorist
man down to Fairfax Drive as soon as humanly possible.
His best man was John-Paul Demonaco.
'J.P.' Demonaco was fifty-two years old, divorced, and a little
loose around the waistline. He had thinning brown hair and wore a
pair Of horn-rimmed glasses. His rumpled grey polyester suit had
been bought from J.C. Penney for a hundred dollars in 1994, while
the Versace tie that he wore with it had been bought for three
hundred dollars only last year. It had been a birthday gift from
his youngest daughter-apparently it was trendy.
Despite his dress sense, Demonaco was Special Agent in Charge of
the FBI's Anti-Terrorist Unit (Domestic), a position he had
occupied for four years now, principally because he knew more about
American terrorism than anybody else alive.
Walking down the white-lit hallway, Demonaco saw another bodybag
lying on the floor in front of him. A star of
blood smeared the wall above it. He added the bag to his
tally. That made ten already.
What on earth had happened here?
He turned a corner and immediately saw a small crowd
of people standing at the entrance to a laboratory at the end
of the corridor.
Most of the members of the crowd, he saw, were dressed
in perfectly starched, dark blue U.S. Navy uniforms.
A twentysomething lieutenant met him halfway down
the corridor.
'Special Agent Demonaco?'
Demonaco flashed his ID in response.
'This waj6 please. Commander Mitchell is expecting
you.'
The young lieutenant led him into the laboratory. As he entered the
lab, Demonaco silently took in the wall- mounted security cameras,
the thick hydraulic doors, the alpha-numeric locks.
Jesus, it was a goddamn vault.
'Special Agent Demonaco?' a voice said from behind
him. Demonaco turned to see a handsome young officer standing
before him. The man was about thirty-six years old, tall, with blue
eyes and short sandy-blond hair—a Navy poster boy. And for some
reason that Demonaco
couldn't quite pin down, he looked oddly familiar.
'Yeah, I'm Demonaco.'
'Commander Tom Mitchell. Naval Criminal Investigative
Service.'
NCIS, Demonaco thought. Interesting.
When he had arrived at Fairfax Drive, Demonaco had barely even
noticed the Navy servicemen guarding the entrance to the building.
It wasn't unusual in the DC area to have certain federal buildings
guarded by specific branches of the armed forces. For example, Fort
Meade, the headquarters of the NSA, was actually an Army compound.
The White House, on the other hand, was guarded by members of the
United States Marine Corps. It would have come as no surprise to
Demonaco to learn that DARPA was protected by
the U.S. Navy. Which would have explained all the Navy suits here
now.
But no. If the NCIS was here, that meant something else entirely.
Something that went beyond merely failing to protect a federal
building. Something internal…
'I don't know if you remember me,” Mitchell said, “but I took your
seminar at Quantico about six months ago. “The
Second Amendment and the Rise of the Militia Groups”.'
So that was where he had seen Mitchell before.
Every three months, Demonaco gave a seminar at Quantico on domestic
terrorist organisations in the United States.
In his lectures, he basically outlined the make-up, methods and
philosophies of the more organised militia groups in the
country—groups like the Patriots, the White Aryan Resistance or the
Republican Army of Texas.
After the Oklahoma City bombing and the bloody siege at the Coltex
nuclear weapons facility in Amarillo, Texas, Demonaco's seminars
had been in high demand. Especially among the armed forces, since
their bases—and the buildings they protected—were often the targets
of domestic terrorist acts.
'What can I do for you, Commander Mitchell?'
Demonaco said.
'Well, first of all, as you will no doubt appreciate, everything
you see or hear in this room is strictly classifi—'
'What is it you want me to do?' Demonaco was famous for his
inability to put up with bullshit.
Mitchell took a deep breath. 'As you can see, we had something of
an… incident.., here yesterday morning. Seventeen security staff
killed and a weapon of immense importance stolen. We have reason to
believe that a domestic terrorist organisation was involved, which
is why you were called in—'
'Is that him? Is that him?' a rough-sounding voice said from
somewhere nearby.
Demonaco turned and saw a severe-looking captain with a grey
moustache and a matching grey crew-cut striding quickly toward him
and Commander Mitchell.
The captain glared at Mitchell. 'I told you this was a
mistake, Tom. This is an internal matter. We don't need to involve
the FBI in this.'
'Special Agent Demonaco,' Mitchell said, 'this is Captain Vernon
Aaronson. Captain Aaronson has overall responsi bility for this
investigation—'
'But Commander Mitchell here, it seems, has the ear of those who
would like to see this puzzle solved more slowly than it has to
be,' Aaronson quipped.
Demonaco judged Vernon Aaronson to be a couple of years older—and
at least a decade more bitter—than his subordinate, Commander
Mitchell.
'I had no choice, sir,' Mitchell said. 'The President
insisted—'
'The President insisted…' Aaronson snorted.
'He didn't want to see a repeat of the Baltimore freeway
incident.'
Ah, Demonaco thought. So that was it.
On Christmas Day 1997, an unmarked DARPA transport truck travelling
from New York to Virginia was hijacked as it travelled along the
Baltimore beltway. Stolen from the truck were sixteen J-7 jet packs
and forty-eight prototype explosive charges—small
chrome-and-plastic tubes that looked like glass laboratory
vials.
But these were no ordinary explosive charges. Officially, they were
called M-22 isotopic charges, but around DARPA tley were known as
'Pocket Dynamos'.
Put simply, the Pocket Dynamo was an evolutionary step forward in
high-temperature liquid chemical technol ogy. The result of
thirteen years' concerted labour by the United States Army and
DARPA's Advanced Ordnance Division, the M-22 utilised
laboratory-created isotopes of the element chlorine to deliver a
concentrated blast wave of such savage intensity that it literally
vaporised anything within a two-hundred-yard radius of the
detonation point.
It was designed for use by small incursionary units on sabotage or
search-and-destroy missions—where the mis sion objective was to
leave absolutely nothing behind. The isotopic explosion of an M-22
charge was second only in
intensity to a thermonuclear blast, but without the attendant
radioactive aftereffects.
What Demonaco also knew about the Baltimore freeway incident,
however, was that the Army had handled the investigation into the
theft themselves.
Two days after the daring robbery, the Army investigators received
a tip-off regarding the location of the stolen weapons and without
so much as consulting with the FBI or the CIA, a squad of Green
Berets was ordered to storm the headquarters of an underground
militia group in northern Idaho. Ten people were killed, twelve
were wounded. It turned out to be the wrong group. In fact, more
than that, it turned out to be one of the more benign paramilitary
groups around, more like a gun club than a terrorist cell. No
isotopic explosives were found on their premises. The ACLU and the
NRA had had a field day.
The jet packs and the M-22s were never recovered.
Quite obviously Demonaco thought, the President didn't want another
such embarrassment here. Which was why he had been called in.
'So what is it you want me to look at?' he said.
'This,' Mitchell said, pulling something from his pocket and
handing it to Demonaco.
It was a clear plastic evidence bag.
In it was a blood-stained bullet.
Demonaco sat down at a nearby table to examine the blood- smeared
bullet.
'Where was this taken from, one of the security personnel?'
'No,' Mitchell said. 'The driver of the delivery van they used to
get in. He was the only one they killed with a pistol.'
Captain Aaronson added, 'After they used him to get past the garage
guards, they popped him in the head at point-blank range.'
'A calling card,' Demonaco said.
“Uh-huh.'
'Looks like a tungsten core…' Demonaco said, perusing the spent
projectile.
'That's what we thought, too,' Aaronson said. 'And as far as we
know, only one terrorist organisation in the United States is known
to use tungsten-based ammunition. The Oklahoma Freedom
Fighters.'
Demonaco didn't look up from the bullet in his hands.
'That's true, but the Freedom Fighters—'
'—are known to operate like this,' Aaronson cut in. 'Spe cial
forces-type entry, double-taps to their victims' heads, the theft
of cutting-edge military technology.'
'It would appear that you've been to one of my seminars, too,
Captain Aaronson,' Demonaco said.
'Yes, I have,' Aaronson said, 'but I also consider myself to be a
specialist in this field, too. I've studied these groups
extensively as part of ongoing Naval security updates. We have to
keep an eye on these people, too, you know.'
'Then you'd know that the Freedom Fighters are in the middle of a
turf war with the Texans,' Demonaco said.
Aaronson bit his lip, frowned. He obviously hadn't known that. He
glared at Demonaco, stung by the veiled retort.
Demonaco looked up at the two Naval officers through his
horn-rimmed glasses. There was something they weren't telling
him.
'Gentlemen. What happened here?'
Aaronson and Mitchell exchanged a look.
'What do you mean?' Mitchell asked.
'I can't help you if I don't know the full story of what hap pened
here. Like, for starters, what it was that was stolen.'
Aaronson grimaced. Then he said, 'They were after a device called
the Supernova. They knew where it was and how to get it. They knew
all the codes and had all the card- keys. They moved with precision
and speed, like a well-oiled commando unit.'
Demonaco said, 'The Freedom Fighters' strike team is good but it
isn't big enough to take down a place this size.
It's too small, maybe two or three men at the most. That's
why they only attack soft targets—-computer labs, low-level
government offices—places from which they can steal technical data
like electrical schematics or satellite overpass times. But most
importantly, they only attack sites that are lightly guarded. Not
fortresses like this. They're first and
foremost techno-nuts, not a full-frontal assault squad.'
'But they are the only group known to use tungsten-
based ammunition,' Aaronson said.
'That's true.'
'So maybe they've stepped up their operations,' Aaron- son said
smugly. 'Maybe they're trying to make the leap into
the big leagues.'
'Possible.'
'It's possible,' Aaronson snorted. 'Special Agent Demonaco, perhaps
I haven't made something clean The device that was stolen from this
facility is of the utmost importance to the future defence of the
United States. In the wrong hands, its use could be catastrophic.
Now, I have SEAL teams standing by right now to take out three
suspected Freedom Fighter locations. But my bosses need to know
that this is clean—they don't want another Baltimore.
All we need from you is an acknowledgment that this robbery could
only have been done by them.'
'Well…' Demonaco began.
It all depended on the tungsten bullets, really. But for some
reason that Demonaco couldn't quite put his finger on, their use
here troubled him…
'Agent Demonaco,' Aaronson said, 'let me make this simpler. To the
best of your knowledge, is there any paramilitary group in the
United States other than the Oklahoma
Freedom Fighters that uses tungsten-cored ammunition?'
'No,' Demonaco said.
'Good. Thank you.'
And with that, Aaronson gave Demonaco and Mitchell a withering
glare and stalked away to a nearby telephone where he dialled a
short number and said, 'This is Aaron- son. Assault operations are
go. Repeat. Assault operations are go. Take the bastards
down.'