Gauntlet (53 page)

I
T WAS 4AM IN WASHINGTON, Dc. During more tranquil days, the TTIC control room would have been empty, save possibly for Turbee’s workstation. Not now. There were at least a dozen people at work, scrolling through data on computer screens, holding meetings on telephones, and working with their Blackberries. All had seen the chilling fifth message, and saw the impact it was having on the city of Las Vegas. Johnson had the major news channels running on the 101 screens, so that they could see the repeating images of violence and panic. Looting had indeed broken out in one section of the city, and with the enactment of martial law, one looter had already been shot. A major event was developing. The terrorist attack was officially underway, although no bomb had been detonated. One of the Emir’s goals had been to create chaos and terror. His mission had already been successful.

Turbee wasn’t watching the screens. He didn’t need to know what was going on in Las Vegas right now. There were more pressing things to think about. How was the Emir going to destroy the city? That was the important issue. He didn’t believe that there would be a nuclear attack, or even a dirty bomb. He couldn’t accept the validity of the decrypted messages that the NSA was pulling off the Internet. Turbee was of the view that the whole nuclear issue was a ruse, to deflect attention away from the true threat, which was the Semtex.

He tried to follow the logic. Assume the Semtex was now in the States, assume even that it was in Nevada or Arizona. Maybe in Las Vegas itself. How could 4.5 tons of plastic explosive destroy a city? He had become something of an explosives expert in the course of the past four weeks. His original equations to calculate the Libyan crater size had been taken from the standard equations used to calculate blast forces at certain distances from the center of the explosion. If those equations were correct, then there was no way that this amount of Semtex could destroy an entire city. If the entire Libyan stockpile had been detonated on Hotel Row, yes, most of the hotels would be obliterated and an enormous blast force would result. But not with only 4.5 tons. He was missing something.

Turbee put the city of Las Vegas up on the Atlas Screen, placing it in the center of a 50-mile circle. The database’s library was rich enough to plot every chemical factory, refinery, and critical site within that radius. Turbee spent a long time looking at the map, first zooming in on one feature, then another, but nothing clicked. There was just no way to blow up Vegas with the amount of Semtex the terrorists had at hand.

Then he pulled the text of the fifth message up on the screen in front of him. The message did not say that the Emir would blow up Las Vegas. He said that the city would die, and all who remained within it would perish. How did you do that with only 4.5 tons of explosive? He became obsessed with the issue. Those who knew him well knew that he wouldn’t be able to rest until he had it figured out.

One of the strengths of TTIC, on paper, was that each branch of the Intelligence Community was represented by at least two, and with some of the larger agencies, three, individuals. Theoretically, if critical information was developed by one branch, it would be immediately available to all branches. Khasha, for instance, would send information obtained by Turbee on the Internet to the various NSA Dictionaries and other groups. DEA information developed by Lance could be used by TTIC, the CIA, or the FBI, almost the instant that the information became known. Each individual in the control room acted as a node within an incredibly complex neural computer. In theory. The problem, in part, was that it was a very young agency, and there was a considerable degree of ambiguity in its mandate. Matters weren’t helped by Dan’s arrogance. But occasionally, it worked. It was the reason that they were heading this investigation. The government believed that they had the best chance of finding the bad guys. The nation was waiting with bated breath, counting on TTIC to figure it out.

Knowing this was making Turbee work twice as hard. He sighed, turned to another screen, and opened up a new search program.

K
HASHA threw down her pencil in frustration. “Turb, I’m just completely fed up with this. I feel like I’m chasing ghosts. Not one scintilla of hard evidence.”

“What’s up, Khash?”

“Dan is obsessed with the hypothesis that the Emir’s threats involve a nuclear attack,” she said.

“Well, I guess it’s reasonable,” Turbee replied. “There’s a lot of chatter on the web about it. Goldberg’s message is consistent with the theory. Personally, though, I don’t believe it. It is going to be the Semtex, I just can’t figure out how it’s going to happen.”

“Fine. Fine and fine. But it’s now 5AM, and Dan’s nowhere in sight. I’m sure we’ll have the Semtex cornered within the next 24 hours. Why don’t you help me out on this? Maybe you can figure something out.”

“What’s the issue?” asked Turbee.

“Simple. Help me find out where all this stuff is coming from. All we seem to be getting is Internet chatter, for want of a better word. Highly encrypted, obscure dialect chatter, tons of it, from servers in Russia and Nigeria. Full of weird proxy stuff that we can’t nail down. There’s no hard evidence at all,” she said, rubbing her temples with her fingers. “Not one stick.”

“This sounds like a job for Lord Shatterer,” said Turbee with a sly grin.

“Lord what?”

“Umm, an, um... Internet gaming proxy that I use every now and then,” said Turbee, smiling a bit. “Lord Shatterer of Deathrot. I use him in multi-player Doom-type games. He’s actually very famous.”

“I don’t see how that can help, but can you have a go at it?”

“Sure, Khash. I’m stumped on the ’Death of Vegas’ message. I can’t figure out how it’s going to happen. Might as well give this a whirl. Point me to a few of the websites,” said Turbee. “Let me see what I can do.”

“Actually, Turbee, there are thousands of them.”

“Thousands? Of websites?”

“Yes,” responded Khasha. “Thousands of websites dealing with the coming nuclear strike against America.”

Turbee puffed his cheeks out in a silent whistle. “OK. Give me the list,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

T
HE SUN WAS COMING UP. It was 7AM in Washington, DC, and 4AM in Nevada. It had taken Turbee less than two hours to ascertain that all of the chatter, and all of the websites, had been created by two highly skilled, very imaginative, and very clever computer programmers — one in Cairo, the other in Karachi. It was all obviously a hoax. They had used a dizzying array of techniques to disguise their identities. Everything had been accomplished through a nested series of proxies, using servers from one end of the planet to the other. They were brilliant, thought Turbee. Absolutely brilliant.

When Turbee shared his news, it was Rahlson who stated the obvious. “So we apply Occam’s Razor reasoning to this. There were two likely candidates for the vehicle of the Emir’s terror. One was the nuclear threat, the other the stolen Semtex. Now that we know that the nuclear threat was a hoax, it gets knocked out of the picture. Only one possibility remains.”

“Wonderful,” replied Turbee. “Now all we need to figure out is where the Semtex is, and how it can possibly be used to destroy a major American city.”

“You’re the one who gets to tell Alexander when he shows up,” Khasha told Rahlson. “He’s used 95% of TTIC’s work force to chase smoke for the last week.”

Turbee laughed loudly at the irony. “Now we’re the ones waiting for him to show. And we’re the ones who get to tell him how he screwed up.”

“Yeah,” said George, who had just arrived. “Maybe he’ll get to spend a night or two at St. Liz’s.”

I
N THE SEFID KOH, Jennifer and Richard were moving east, in a desperate attempt to get within cell phone range. They ran for 15 minutes, then rested for five, as Richard tried to orient himself and recover. Jennifer urged him onward, but it was a losing battle. He was in terrible shape, his hair caked and matted with dry blood, and his clothes soaked in perspiration. He had become totally unfocused as a result of the pain, fatigue, and drugs. He was carrying on long and emotional conversations with the bone he had found in Inzar Ghar. It was late afternoon when Jennifer detected a distant but ominous sound. The dull whapping noise of rotors.

“Richard, that’s a helicopter,” she breathed. “Of course. The drug lords would have alerted the local police force. All they had to say to get a helicopter or two in the air would be that two dangerous cop-killing psychopaths were on the loose in the Frontier Province. That would be enough to get helicopters going back in the US. Why not here?”

“So it would.” Richard had perked up a bit when he heard the sound — the lucid side of his brain seemed to kick into action if the danger became more immediate, a fact for which Jennifer was supremely grateful. He grabbed her arm and pulled. “Let’s go, we don’t have a lot of time left.”

They continued on their upward journey. Occasionally a helicopter would come within a half mile or so, and they would duck down under whatever cover was available. The ascent was steep in parts, gentle in others, but ever upward. It was well into the afternoon when they reached subalpine grassland, dotted with small yellow cedars, poplars, and wormwood. There was nothing but sky at the far end of the pasture.

“Could be a drop off there,” said Jennifer. “Watch yourself.”

Richard was making grumbling noises, which sounded a bit like “yes.” He continued to moan in pain, and was mumbling incoherently about plane crashes and car accidents. He had obviously slipped back into his psychotic realm.

They covered the next 100 feet slowly, with Jennifer looking toward the sky anxiously, watching for helicopters or search planes. When they reached the pasture’s edge, Jennifer instinctively stopped, and pulled a reeling Richard back from the cliff. She leaned over the side and realized that she was looking at least 2,000 feet straight down. The precipice at the bottom of the drop snaked on for what appeared to be miles in both directions. There was no apparent path or negotiable trail visible. They had reached a dead end. The drug runners and their helicopters were looking for them, and would be broadening their search upward from the valley floor. They could not go back. Their only option was to follow the cliff edge, either to the left or to the right.

“Holy shit,” breathed Richard, still hanging on to the chunk of bone. “That’s half a mile straight down.” He was reeling, fighting vertigo and nausea, and backing slowly away from the cliff edge. Jennifer grabbed his shoulder, concerned that in his drugged and delusional state he would simply lurch over the edge, either from lack of balance or just because he believed that he possessed the power of flight.

“That way,” said Richard, pointing left, in one of his flashes of lucidity. “As the crow flies, that will take us further away from that fortress. They’ll be searching in concentric circles from there. Let’s put as many miles between them and us as possible.”

“Brilliant strategy. What do you think we’ve been trying to do for the past 12 hours?” came the acid reply.

Richard muttered under his breath and fumbled through his jacket pocket in search of more medication. Jennifer rolled her eyes again and grabbed him, dragging him along before he had a chance to pop any more pills. Soon they found themselves on a long plateau, with grassy fields between them and the cliff’s edge. Had their circumstances been less desperate, Jennifer would have taken time to survey the stunningly beautiful panorama beyond the ridge. Snow-capped mountains loomed in the distance, with small villages interspersed along the valley. At the edge of the horizon, obscured by haze, meandered the mighty Indus River.

“We need to go in that direction,” slurred Richard, pointing east.

“I agree,” said Jennifer. “But we’ll need to stay away from unprotected ground. We follow the edge from back there,” she said, pointing to the thicker tree cover that ran along the meadow about 50 feet back from the cliff. “Every once in a while I’ll go to the edge and see if there’s anything navigable along that face.”

“Shut up. I was talking to Zak,” responded Richard. “And besides, I can go check the cliff just as easily as you can.”

“Yeah. Right. You’d stumble and fall in a parking lot. As if I’m going to agree to you getting near a cliff,” Jennifer snapped. “As for taking you down that cliff without a path... I’d have to take a bunch of those pills to be crazy enough to do that.”

Richard mumbled incoherently in response.

Jennifer threw her hands in the air, finally losing patience with the situation. She wasn’t trained for the field. She’d never had to deal with people chasing her, trying to kill her. And the fucking CIA had partnered her with a drug addict! She didn’t know if she could count on him to help the situation, and now it turned out that she had to watch his every step, just to make sure he didn’t fall over the edge of a cliff while they were trying to escape. Now that the adrenalin of actually running was leaving her system, she was starting to feel like it was hopeless.

“Screw it, Navy boy,” she almost shouted. “I don’t know what the hell to do. Maybe just staying alive for the next 12 hours is all it’ll take. By then Buckingham may have got things moving on finding us. It’s all I can really think of.”

Richard began mumbling again, directing his comments primarily to Zak, who was silent as they retreated to the cover of the trees. The pounding pain in his head had not subsided, and he was desperately thirsty. He was down to his last few Vicodin. He would run out soon, and at the moment he feared that more than he feared the possibility of capture.

F
OR THE NEXT HALF HOUR, as they walked through the trees, Jennifer made several short trips to the cliff edge, and each time coming back to Richard shaking her head. No trail, no easing of the precipice. Several times they shrank under the cover of the cedar and poplar trees, fearful of detection from the air. There appeared to be several helicopters now involved in the chase, and they were flying ever closer to their location. At one point they found a small stream that cascaded over the cliff edge. The water seemed to invigorate Richard, but in truth, it only helped him in swallowing another three Vicodin. The gnawing fear was increasing. He knew that he was slipping over the edge, but had lost the ability to care. It was all too much.

When he started feeling too dizzy and weak, he simply announced to Jennifer that he was going to sit down and await his fate.

“You go on,” he told her. “Now I’m really done. Leave me be.”

“No, Richard, that is not going to happen. You are a soul in trouble, in many different ways. But you’re also a fellow soldier, in distress. I’m not going to leave you. If we’re captured, it’s going to be together.”

“Jen, listen to me. You can go much faster alone. You’ll be better off without me,” he argued, in a bizarre version of chivalry. “I’ll just take the last of my drugs and wait. Maybe I’ll just heave myself off the cliff. With enough drugs in my system, it won’t be all that bad an end. In fact, I feel like I’m floating off a cliff right now.”

“I’m not leaving you, as much as I would like to,” Jennifer muttered.

The two of them viewed that day in completely different ways. From Richard’s point of view, the day consisted of standing, sitting, or lying down, ingesting more medication and experiencing sheer panic when he thought he might be running out. In his clear moments, it consisted of the immense guilt he was feeling about letting his country down, and leaving Jennifer to deal with the situation alone. For Jennifer the day was a pattern of prodding Richard along, getting him back on his feet, or pulling him bodily off the ground, and ducking for cover from low flying planes or helicopters.

It was just after 5PM, and growing darker, when they heard the dogs.