He would unleash his weapon in all its glorious power and leave them no choice but to treat him with respect.
48
Washington, D.C., July 6, 1330 hours
DIRK PITT HAD A FRONT-ROW SEAT in the Situation Room at the Pentagon. Cameron Brinks of the NSA was putting on a show. The President wasn’t there, but his Chief of Staff, military brass from all four branches, and several members of the cabinet were present. As was the Vice President of the United States, Dirk Pitt’s former boss, Admiral James D. Sandecker.
With the bizarre actions in Sierra Leone over the past few days, followed by the threats coming from its President, Brinks had totally embraced the possibility that Sierra Leone was involved in the scientific kidnappings and the creation of some type of energy weapon.
How else could they have the gall to threaten the world and America in particular? After several days of searching with his satellites, Brinks claimed to have identified the location of such a weapon, calling it a clear and present danger.
At the front of the room, on a screen that was just a fraction smaller than some Jumbotrons he’d seen, Pitt studied a satellite feed. It showed an area off the coast of Sierra Leone, a shallow bay ten miles across, home to an oil production zone known as the Quadrangle because of its dimensions and the four evenly spaced platforms. On a wide angle they showed up as four pinpoints of gray. At closer ranges, those points were easily identifiable as huge offshore oil rigs.
Other data was being overlaid on the screen, numbers and codes that Pitt wasn’t familiar with. In some respects he wondered why he was even there. NUMA was peripherally involved in the search, but for the most part any action at this level would be well out of their hands.
With the participants given a few minutes to review the files in front of them, Dirk studied what he’d been given a second time. One thing that caught his attention was the fact that the entire field and the four rigs were owned by the government of Sierra Leone and always had been, unlike all the structures taken just days before in the sweeping nationalization.
Another red flag that stood out was the fact that oilmen the CIA had spoken with insisted there was no oil beneath the shelf where the Sierra Leone government was drilling. It was a boondoggle, they insisted. A waste of the money the IMF was pouring into the country.
Add to that the continued presence of construction barges and constant deliveries of equipment well after the construction of the platforms was completed, and something odd seemed to be going on.
Pitt closed the file in front of him and looked up to see Brinks and Vice President Sandecker walking his way. They stopped and chatted with the Navy’s chief of staff before wandering over to where Pitt sat.
Pitt stood and shook hands with both men.
“I told you your man was off on a wild-goose chase, looking for this mercenary,” Brinks said.
Pitt smiled and his green eyes showed nothing but pure joy, despite a desire to punch Brinks right in the mouth.
“I honestly hope you’re right,” Pitt said. “After all he’s been through, Austin could use a vacation.”
“Well,” Brinks said confidently, “we’re about to give him one.”
As Brinks moved off, Sandecker took a seat next to Pitt.
“Thanks for the invite,” Pitt said, sarcastically. “It’s like a pool party with sharks and alligators.”
“You think I wanted you here?” Sandecker joked. “Brinks dialed you up.”
“Why?”
“Probably wants to gloat.”
“Nothing like a sore winner,” Pitt said.
Sandecker agreed. “I hear you shot him down pretty hard the other day.”
“He was asking for it,” Pitt said.
The VP chuckled and leaned back, focusing on the screen. “I bet he was.”
Pitt appreciated Sandecker’s support. Always had. “You know it’s weird for me to see you without a cigar in your mouth,” Pitt said.
“No smoking in the Situation Room,” Sandecker replied. “Now, pipe down and you might learn something.”
Up front, Cameron Brinks stood and began his presentation. After explaining what Dirk had already discovered in the file, he went on to elaborate.
“I’ll make this as quick as I can,” he said. “We all know the situation in Sierra Leone is spiraling. What we didn’t know until now is whether there was any credence to the threats leveled against us. We now believe, based on information uncovered by various sources, that there is. As odd as it sounds, Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, is now in possession of a weapon of incredible destructive power.”
Brinks walked to the side of the room, conferring for a second with an assistant who seemed to be hooked up to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the satellite data was coming from.
“In the time since we put together the files in front of you,” Brinks said, “we’ve conducted additional satellite passes of the area described in them. The Quadrangle. The video on the screen is a real-time scan.”
Brinks looked down, waited as his assistant tapped a few keys on the computer terminal in front of him, and then raised a remote control device and pointed at the screen. With the click of a button, the colors on the screen changed. False hues illuminated the water, the land, and features that hadn’t been visible in the earlier shot.
“This is an infrared scan of the Quadrangle area,” Brinks said.
Pitt looked on. The area around each oil platform was bathed in a reddish color that elongated with the tide. It had to be a discharge of some kind, one that was raising the water temperature around the rigs and slowly being drawn off by the current. Pollution was his first thought, leaking oil or distillates of some kind, but then he remembered that there was no oil in the region.
“The rigs are pumping heated water,” he said.
Brinks nodded. “Very good, Mr. Pitt. Each one of these platforms is shipping heated water out into the Atlantic. Hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of high-temperature water every day. There can only be one reason for that: whatever they’re doing requires an immense amount of cooling.”
“They’re generating power,” Pitt whispered to Sandecker a few seconds before Brinks confirmed it.
“The question is, why?” Brinks said. “The answer is simple: to use in a massive particle accelerator that they have turned into a weapon.”
Brinks clicked his remote control, and the image changed again, adding purple to the dark blue, gray, and magenta already on the screen. The new iridescent color ran in a thin line, encircling the four oil rigs — which were, in fact, spaced miles apart — in a giant loop. Other thin fingers branched off this loop and stretched out into the Atlantic. One group went to the west and the northwest, another group north and northeast, a third group of these thin purple filaments branched back toward the African continent.
“This loop demarks an underwater structure that was identified through a combination of infrared scans and surface-penetrating radar from an Aurora spy plane. The loop is fifteen miles in diameter,” Brinks said, using a laser pointer to indicate the circle. “And each of these supposed oil rigs is just a facade to throw us off. Beneath their structures are throbbing power plants, each large enough to light a small city.”
“What kind of power plants?” someone asked.
“Gas turbine generators, feeding off a large natural gas pipeline that was built allegedly to bring gas out of the area. We now know the opposite is true.”
“And all that power?” someone else asked.
“Used in the superconducting electromagnets that accelerate the particles,” Brinks said, “and the massive cooling system required to keep the ring at operating temperature.”
Brinks stood back and explained. “By our calculations, this system is generating and using twenty times the energy that CERN uses for its Large Hadron Collider. We can come up with only one explanation for such a power need. This thing is a weapon. It can probably take down satellites over Europe, the Atlantic, and Africa of course. It can threaten shipping in the Atlantic, perhaps as far as a hundred miles out. It can threaten commercial aircraft in a three-hundred-mile radius.”