“The weapon can only fire three hundred miles?” Pitt asked.
“No,” Brinks said. “It can probably do damage at a much farther range, perhaps even tens of thousands of miles, but it fires in a straight line like a laser. It cannot curve around the surface of the earth like a ballistic missile.”
That made sense, but something else didn’t.
“What about the Kinjara Maru?” Pitt asked. “That ship was nowhere near Sierra Leone when it was hit.”
“No,” Brinks admitted. “Probably they have a derivative weapon on that submarine we’re looking for. But that’s a tactical weapon, small potatoes. This thing is strategic and threatens an entire region. We’ll deal with this first, the submarine afterward.”
Brinks turned back to the group. “Our recommendation is that it be taken out in a surgical airstrike before Djemma can use it against someone.”
Silence followed that statement. No one disagreed, not after Djemma Garand’s actions in the days preceding and his threats, however unspecified, against the United States.
“Best recommendation as to method, Mr. Brinks?” Vice President Sandecker asked.
“Advise we take out the rigs, Mr. Vice President,” Brinks said. “That’ll effectively shut off the power. And without power, the particle accelerator is just a big tunnel with a lot of fancy equipment stored inside.”
Though Pitt didn’t like Brinks’s jaunty tone, he calculated the situation similarly. A threat existed, controlled by a leader who appeared to be unstable. An airstrike would create minimal destruction, minimal casualties. The technology would be preserved for study.
Much to Pitt’s dislike, he had to agree with Brinks’s assessment.
“I’ll relay your recommendation to the President,” Sandecker said, then stood.
Meetings like this didn’t often last long. And even if it was going to continue, the VP had seen enough.
But before he could leave, something odd happened to the screen at the front of the room. The colors shifted for a second and then bled, like something was interfering with the signal.
All eyes focused on it.
Brinks looked to his assistant. “What’s going on?”
The assistant was tapping away at a laptop. He looked up, shaking his head.
A second later a flare of white light crossed the screen and then everything went dark. Static followed and then a blank screen. Text in the bottom right-hand corner indicated complete signal loss.
Brinks looked embarrassed. “Get on the horn and find out what happened to the feed.”
“The line’s clean,” the assistant said. “The signal’s coming through fine. It’s just not carrying any data.”
Pitt had been watching something odd on the screen right before it flared. He doubted anyone else had noticed as the VP was leaving. When Sandecker stood, everyone else stood, Pitt as well, but he’d never taken his eyes off the screen.
That allowed him to see a number indicating heat output from the oil platforms suddenly rising. It had climbed rapidly, like an odometer rolling over. A new area of red and magenta had appeared over one of the angled filaments. It had been visible for only a second, but Pitt was fairly certain he knew what it was.
Somewhere in Fort Meade the techs probably knew too; they just were too stunned to say so until they’d checked every other possibility.
“The problem’s not the computer,” Pitt announced. “It’s your satellite.”
All eyes turned to him.
“Really?” Brinks said. “And when did you become an expert in remote imaging diagnostics?”
“I’m not,” Pitt said. “But play the last five seconds back. You’ll see an energy spike right before the image flared. They fried your satellite, Brinks. It’s gone.”
Brinks looked over at his assistant. “We’re trying to reestablish a link,” he said.
“Forget it,” Pitt told him. “You’re calling up a dead bird.”
“Switch to Keyhole Bravo,” Brinks said, referencing the backup satellite that was orbiting at a different angle and higher altitude.
Brinks’s assistant finished his last desperate act of tapping and looked up. There was nothing to say.
“Two satellites gone,” Sandecker said. “That’s a damn act of war.”
Everyone in the room grew more somber at that realization.
“I figured you’d be happy,” Pitt said to Brinks. “This proves your theory. Djemma Garand is dangerous, his weapon is operational, and he’s not afraid to use it. Even I agree with you now. He has to be taken out.”
49
Somewhere over the Atlantic, July 7
KURT AUSTIN AND JOE ZAVALA found themselves in the noisy cockpit of a Russian-designed IL-76 transport as it cruised at thirty-four thousand feet. They sat in the jump seats, just behind the pilots. They wore headsets and flight suits and stared through the windshield at a brilliant sunset out over the Atlantic.
After leaving Singapore, they’d spent several days rounding up the equipment Kurt felt he needed to get aboard the Onyx. The last piece of the puzzle had been a jet capable of a transatlantic hop, piloted by a few people that would ask no questions.
They’d chartered it out of Tangiers, through a somewhat murky chain of brokers that began with an Egyptian friend of Joe’s, who knew a man from Greece, who had good contacts with a few people in Morocco.
While the chain of command worried Kurt a bit, the aging craft they were flying in was even more concerning. It shook and rattled and smelled as if it were leaking jet fuel in half a dozen places. The pilots tapped hard on the old analog-style gauges as if they weren’t working, fiddled with a pair of fuses at one point, and chatted in English with an Eastern European accent, making constant references to the “worthless mechanics.”
So far, the wings hadn’t fallen off. Kurt considered that a small victory.
As he pondered whether their luck would hold, the copilot turned to him.
“Radio call for you,” he said. “Switch to channel two on headset.”
Kurt looked over at the toggle switch beside the headset jack. Cyrillic writing and the numbers 1 and 2 presented themselves. He flipped the switch to number 2.
“This is Kurt,” he said.
“You’re a damn hard person to find, Kurt.” It was the voice of Dirk Pitt. “If it wasn’t for a rather large item on your NUMA credit line regarding an aircraft charter, I wouldn’t have been able to track you down.”
“Um, yeah,” Kurt mumbled. “I can explain that.”
He tapped the copilot on the shoulder.
“Is this line secure?” Kurt asked.
The copilot nodded. “It’s a proprietary channel. Scrambled until it reaches plane.” He smiled, a large mustache turning up with the corners of his mouth. “All part of our service to you.”
Kurt almost laughed. Not exactly the cone of silence, he thought, but it would have to do.
“I think we’re onto something,” he said, wishing he had been able to have this conversation after he’d confirmed the accuracy of that particular thought. “I think we’ve found our man.”
“Where?” Dirk asked.
“On a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.”
“Then why are you airborne?”
Kurt gazed out the window. The sun was about to drop below the horizon ahead of them. The moment of truth was still two hours away.
“It’s the only way to get close enough,” he said. “The ship we think he’s on is sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, making a few knots and pretty much going nowhere. The problem is, it’s a hundred miles from the nearest shipping lane in a barren spot in the middle of the ocean. Approaching it on the water would be a dead giveaway — with emphasis on the word dead. Our only hope is an airdrop.”