The Orion Protocol (27 page)

62

Boulder, Colorado

Lightning was crackling, sending bright white fiber-optic roots to ground all around him, and Jake could feel the hair on his arms levitating. The following thunder was a basso profundo that juddered up the soles of his work boots and deep into the twisted laundry that was his stomach.

There would be a cold squall, and soon.

Jouncing through the brush in his ’76 Pathfinder truck, he noticed how his own fight/flight adrenaline made every physical move, every mental action, seem achingly clear and present. It was almost a spiritual experience.

“Scared awake.” He laughed, trying to cheer himself on.

Back at the cabin, creeping on foot through a heavy screen of pines that bordered his property, he’d watched the black, unmarked Chevy van unloading its packet of operatives. When the heavily armed team rushed the front door, Jake had made a dash for the garage and his Pathfinder and then roared out the utility road, heading uphill.

With high clearance and four-wheel drive, he now drove as fast as he dared, thinking his best chance of losing them would be off-road. After that, he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do, but first things first.

As he took a sharp left into some low scrub, lightning flashed again and the first spatter of rain strafed the windshield. This time of year that should have been good for snow. But whatever was playing havoc with the
world’s weather systems, it was only freezing above seven thousand feet, so in the foothills of Boulder rain just meant mud.

Good
. Jake checked his rearview.
Mud is good.

Then a wind came up strong enough to buffet the cab, the clouds dropped cargo, and Jake had his wish. Zagging downhill, he slipped and thumped over the rocky terrain and got a first glimpse in the mirror of the black van muscling and banging its way behind him.

“Shit.”

The good news was that, so far, the wet had yet to compromise the purchase of the vintage Nissan’s all-season tires. He was going to need that grip for all it was worth.

Making a hard off-camber turn that dumped him in a controlled fall onto a rarely used rutted track, Deaver gathered speed and distance for a quarter mile, then jumped back off-road again as the van reappeared far behind him.

Inside the slithering black Suburban that was slamming its bump stops all the way down the hill, FBI agents Stottlemeyer and Markgrin held on to whatever they could, but this was just a courtesy ride-along.

The Defense Intelligence crew running the show had come heavy: cammies, Kevlar vests, flash grenades, machine pistols, and laser-scoped sniper rifles.

“Unhh. Jesus.”

Stottlemeyer grunted after a particularly harsh impact as they followed Deaver off-road, and gave Markgrin a look: there was no way this was going to end except badly. He shouted up to the DIA team leader.

“You don’t think this might be overkill. Just a wee bit?”

“You were the one who said he wouldn’t run. By the way, what kind of weapons would he have in that old rice burner?”

“Weapons?”

“Hunting knives, rifles, shotguns? There was only one in the house.”

A cammo’d op produced an unloaded service revolver in a Marine Corps holster. Stottlemeyer rolled his eyes.

“Guess you missed the ceremonial sword. It goes with the dress whites.”

“Might not be all he’s got,” the team leader said, pronouncing this wisdom with a kind of clipped righteousness meant to cut off further discussion.

Then the pounding rain was drumming down so hard on the van’s thin roof skin that conversation became impossible anyway.

63

Map Room/the White House

The Secret Service were obliged to wait outside the Map Room in the White House, where the National Security Council was in session: no one guarding the President had the clearance to hear what was being revealed.

Behind those closed doors, Winston led the discussion, standing next to a globe of the Earth that was easily ten feet in circumference. They had already covered antigravitic propulsion technology and high-altitude microwave-beam weapons bouncing death off the upper atmosphere with scaled-down mobile applications for crowd control, and a whole lot more from the dark world of Unacknowledged Projects.

“The next category is weaponization of weather,” Winston was saying. “We’re playing catch-up with the Russians on Battlefield Weather Modification, but we’re making progress. Mainly in forced inducement of drought and flooding, creating earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. Ongoing testing is, of course, taking place strictly in underpopulated regions.”

Winston indicated flagged spots in the Far East, including a few where artificially induced “natural” disasters had regrettably spread beyond isolated test areas, causing widespread destruction and human suffering.

“Battlefield Weather Modification,” the President repeated.

“Yes. It’s not an exact science, but we can almost put a tornado down on the ground wherever we want to, potentially incapacitating a
standing army. When the Northern Alliance was champing at the bit to take Kabul, we stalled them and bought ourselves a couple of days with a sandstorm. Controlling it after it’s been generated is something else, but the technology is promising.”

“Smart storms,” the President said, unsure which was more insane: that this
could
be done or that it was being done.

Winston read his reaction.

“If it can be done, Mr. President, how can we afford not to do it?”

Ignoring the rhetoric, Sokoff jumped in.

“Mr. President, you can stop it and we can probably get the Russians to stop it, but we could never go public with it. The liability issue alone . . . every hurricane in Asia would get blamed on American weapons testing. There’d be calls for reparations, business insurance would melt down—”

“Mr. Sokoff, I won’t tell FEMA if you won’t. Can we move on?” Winston loved hearing the President’s counsel making the case for secrecy.

“Unacknowledged R and D is a crucial element of national security, authorized by tacit EOs and funded by Aerospace and Defense monies, congressional allocations, and so-called black budget or off/book discretionary dollars for over fifty years. It’s about protecting our security future.”

Sokoff coughed into his fist and leaned over to the President.

“ ‘Tacit’ executive orders?”

But the President waved him off.

“How much money are we talking about, Bob? Altogether. Everything.”

“Fifty billion annually, Mr. President, give or take.”

A shocked murmur among the military men rippled around the room; mostly plain surprise, curdled with jealousy on behalf of their own service’s budget constraints.

Winston waited while the hubbub died down. He had decided not to mention the additional billions put to work supplying weapons for every side of every armed conflict, rebellion, or civil war around the globe. Profits sometimes amplified by payment taken in heroin or cocaine and turned into cash by favored drug cartels. He didn’t want to
muddy the already murky waters for the new Occupant, who seemed understandably out of his depth.

“Fifty billion dollars,” the President said. “All right, I want everyone in this room to hear this loud and clear: as Commander in Chief, I can and will impose moratoriums on any or all of these programs, if that is in the best interests of the United States. And I don’t give a shit whose bread falls butter-side down.”

The President looked around the table, taking in the entire council, including the CIA chief, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of NSA and Defense Intelligence, and others, each of whom had his or her most game face on.

“That is a given, Mr. President,” Winston said, “but with all due respect, sir, tarring Project Orion with the same brush as weather mods or these other things would be extremely unfortunate and, I think, shortsighted, given the narrow window.”

“We’re aware of the timetable,” the President said, locking eyes with Winston. “Let’s get back to the black budget projects.”

64

Everything outside Jake’s windshield kept disappearing in the lashing sideways deluge. Steering the spartan Pathfinder by Braille he hoped he was closing on an arroyo where he’d either find disaster or the break he needed.

Squinting between swipes of smeary wiper blades, he got a glimpse of the normally dry creek bed and hit the wet brakes hard. The creek was now a swift and rising river, and he was about to find out exactly how far it had risen.

Jake shifted gears and inched forward, sliding down the collapsing banks and fighting to keep from getting his truck sideways. Grinding through river water up to the engine mounts, he revved the Nissan four-banger furiously until he was out of the water and then gunned it like a crazy man up the other side of the arroyo.

“Whoo-hoo!”

From his new vantage point Jake looked back, swerving parallel with the swollen creek. The pursuing three-ton Suburban could either follow suit or fold.

Through exploding sheets of rain, he could just make out the black truck as it slowly approached the arroyo, tipped itself down the sodden banks at a crazy angle, hit the water, and got bogged down up to the hubs.

“Yes!”

Jake watched the sliding side door open and three DIA men splash out, up to their bulletproof vests in rushing water and battling just to keep their footing.

Then he heard the unambiguous stutter of automatic pistols on rock and roll.

“Shit!”

Deaver threw himself down across the passenger seat, dropping the clutch he forgot he was riding. The vintage Pathfinder lurched and stalled out.

Inside the black van a former Olympic shooting medalist had started getting ready by taking his gloves off and warming his hands like a concert musician. Watching helplessly as the DIA fuckup played itself out, Stottlemeyer and Markgrin found it nightmarish and absurd. It was going bad: lethally, career-endingly bad. When the wallowing Suburban died and the two gym-rat hard-ons jumped out into the water and started emptying their clips, the Fibbies threw themselves past the stunned team leader and out the door.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

Jake didn’t see the G-men or their shouting match and comic wrestling melee with the intel ops in the river or hear what they were shouting. Lying across the hand break and yanking the shifter into neutral, he was too involved with staying low, grinding the starter, and praying for spark.

As lightning lit the scene like a phosphorus flare, he lifted his head and peeked outside. A red dot of laser light flicked across his eyelashes and Jake got a long harrowing look at a man wearing a watch cap and aiming a high-caliber sniper rifle at him from inside the open door of the van.

He knew the truck offered no real protection: a round from a weapon like that had an all-access pass. Even a mediocre shooter could put a bullet through his door faster than you could say, “I’m with the band.”

But between the ruby blink of that realization and the impulse to put his hands up in surrender, the situation changed and Jake heard it coming: it was like the hollow sound of the ocean inside a conch shell, amplified and deepened by the concussive rush of rolling rocks and stones that were being swept up into the grainy mix and powering down the arroyo like a runaway train.

Once the flash flood hit, it was over in about five heartbeats. The laser targeting Deaver’s face disappeared just as an eight-foot wall of water and highballing stones exploded over the huge black Chevy, skewing it sideways and washing all the former occupants downstream like summer-camp kids white-water rafting.

“Thank you!”

Jake hit the starter again, directing his gratitude up toward any eavesdropping deities who might have intervened.

“Thank you very much!”

When the damp points caught, he revved the Nissan engine back to life, blessed its 230,000 miles of loyal service, and worked his way down the mountain to the county road.