As he claimed his chair at the head of the table in the War Room, Hal Brognola found Barbara Price and Aaron Kurtzman watching him closely. Settling in and leaning back, he took a few moments, conscious suddenly of what seemed to be the ten years he’d just aged in the past twelve hours or so. They had to have read the haggard look and smoldering burn in his eyes for something other than the usual weariness, anger and anxiety when he found the combined power of Stony Man holding up the weight of the world. Since he was in charge of the Sensitive Operations Group, the crushing weight of the ultimate success or failure of any mission was sometimes daunting. But this time he and the Farm weren’t alone in shouldering the burden of Atlas. With any number of intelligence and military spooks throwing their weight around, Brognola knew the waters were murkier than he could recall in long memory, chummed fat and wide, with man eaters circling for what may well prove a global feeding frenzy.
Against his will, the big Fed’s thoughts remained locked on the cracking ice of international outrage, the possibility that a rogue or supposed friendly nation was orbiting nuclear satellites around the planet and looking for blood. Beyond the stark and frightening facts as Stony Man knew them, Brognola realized ground zero in the Australian outback wouldn’t rate a footnote in history if a nuclear spear was plunged into a major city from above Earth’s atmosphere.
Sensing the mission controller and the head of the cyberteam were anxious but giving him some time to gather his thoughts, breathe air free of human rot and all its treachery and malice, the big Fed sipped some of the battery acid Kurtzman passed off as coffee. He unwrapped a fresh cigar, stuck it in a corner of his mouth, rolled his shoulders. He took a deep breath, let it out and told them, “In the few brief moments the President could spare me, he green-lighted us to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of what happened in Australia. Nail it down. The Man wants a rapid response, folks, no punches pulled, no mercy whatsoever to whoever the perpetrators. They go down hard, and, if possible, their names and misdeeds are to be buried along with them. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, he also implied that, because of the nature of the crisis, there’s a good chance our teams may well be locking horns with any number of operators—CIA, NSA, DOD, DIA. You name it.”
“In other words,” Kurtzman said, “beware of those bearing free gifts.”
Brognola nodded, aware that Kurtzman and Price were apprised of the encounter in upstate Maryland. “The hacker problem is, of course, our situation to deal with, which, needless to say, we’re out of business if it hits the Washington Post. Now, from what I gather, you two think there are pieces of this whole sordid puzzle that want to fit and that want to tie together the hackers and a nuke slamming into the Australian out-back from space?”
Price cleared her throat. “Unfortunately we’re not sure of anything at this stage.”
“Okay, so we’re early in the game, but we’re in. Go ahead and give me what you do have. Good news–bad news, what we know and what we don’t.”
Kurtzman clicked on the wall monitor. “What you’re looking at, Hal, is about fifteen to twenty square miles of irradiated earth.”
Brognola peered at the image. The screen showed nothing other than an unusual white glow. He frowned at Kurtzman. “Aaron…”
“You see nothing, Hal, because that’s what our satellites see as the result of a fission blast more than twice the twenty-two-kilotons that was dropped on Nagasaki. In other words, until some of the heat dissipates our space probes are useless over this tract of Queensland. The good news—if it can be called that—is that there are maybe two human beings per square mile up to fifty to seventy or more square miles in the immediate affected area. My point—I’m thinking there was some method behind the madness of whoever did this, as far, that is, as containing immediate collateral damage.”
Brognola chomped on his cigar, trying like hell not to glower. He already knew that electromagnetic pulse had affected Australia as far as Sydney and other east coast cities. He knew that eighty-five percent of the country’s population lived along the coasts, which was the only other piece of questionable good news as far as the blast went. He knew prevailing winds would carry fallout and that radiation dosages could reach well beyond the lethal eight hundred. He knew Great Britain’s former penal colony was one riot away from declaring martial law, but that a cover story was already being handed to the press by the parliament, everything from a secret nuclear reactor meltdown to an asteroid, though it sounded to him nobody knew which direction to start dancing. He hoped Kurtzman was getting somewhere fast other than a show-and-tell of what he already knew.
“What I’m saying, Hal, and I’m not trying to be a wiseass, is that blank picture is about where we are, at least in regard to whoever is actually behind the incident. The list of countries we know of that have satellites is lengthy. Many of which have covert space programs.”
“Black ops.”
“Black ops. For some time, the NSA and CIA have believed that China and Russia are dabbling in everything from antigravity devices to reverse engineering of alien spacecraft. The ESA has fifteen members alone, and that doesn’t include our friends north of the border.”
“So, pick one—that’s what you’re trying to tell me?”
Price stepped in. “When you transcribed the CD to us from the chopper, it gave us a few nibbles to run with, but…”
Brognola stared at the dark look in Price’s eyes as she fell silent.
And there it was.
From the White House, around the world and back to Stony Man, it seemed everyone was at a loss to explain, or begin to find answers. What he knew for certain was the smoke screen to be thrown up between Washington, Great Britain and the prime minister of Australia may or may not hold back the world from collapsing into a tailspin of panic and anarchy.
There was a truth, however, that few outside the elite U.S. intelligence circles knew—Australia had medium-range nukes, and three reactors. It was a covert program, Brognola had learned, agreed upon by the U.S., England and Australia several years back when it was feared North Korea would eventually go nuclear. Since that fear had become reality, the three countries had already scrambled ahead of North Korean timetables to build silos in the Australian outback. The conventional wisdom was nukes in that part of the world would guarantee the shortest, quickest and most undetectable flight path in the event Pyongyang did the unthinkable.
“So, we’re nowhere.”
“Actually,” Kurtzman said, “at this stage, we’d only be feeding back to you a lot of what your source gave you, some of which we were able to verify as accurate through more official channels.”
“What about the part of that package related to our hacker woes?” Brognola asked.
“That much we nailed,” Kurtzman said. “I agree with Akira that they either aren’t as smart as they think or, as we suspect, they’re taunting us. They barely bothered to hide their real identities, when you consider they used the same credit card to stay online, one belonging to a former encryption expert by the name of David Rosenberg, who worked for the Department of Defense. They call themselves the Force of Truth. Their Web site is AlphaDataSystems.com. I ran a background check through official and unofficial channels on these guys. There are six of them altogether. The FBI went through with a follow-up surveillance after three of them hacked into their own mainframes, and also dipped their ghost fingers in over at Langley and the NSA a few years back. It’s them, no question about it.”
“We’ve already determined as much by my own source,” Brognola said, then softened the edge in his voice. “So, just what do you think they’re all about? Blackmail? Showing us theirs is bigger than ours?”
“Nuts, brilliant ones,” Kurtzman said, “but still nuts. Their Webs read like a conspiracy basket case’s textbook manual from A to Z. ETs, ELEs, something called Hangar 13 that’s housed in Cheyenne Mountain and that NORAD is guarding the keys to the knowledge of the ages about UFOs. Big Foot, Loch Ness…”
“I’ve got the picture.”
“But they have come up with some juicy facts regarding this Galileo SADS,” Kurtzman said. “Whoever they are, these guys are out there in deep space, Hal. Considering their history, the stunt they’re pulling now, I’m amazed they haven’t been already grabbed by the NSA or the FBI and deep-sixed in the Atlantic.”
“But, if we’re to believe what’s in my source’s package, there are official operators who have already gotten the jump, en route, as I speak, to give our basket cases a lesson on the facts of life,” Brognola told them.
“Bottom line, we won’t really know what they’re all about,” Price said, “until Able has paid our hacker friends a visit at their Virginia Beach residence. Which brings us to the problem of Able stepping into the crosshairs, figurative or real, of an official operation.”
Grunting, Brognola checked his watch, then drew a rough mental map. Factor in miles, and with limited traffic at that hour all the way to Hampton Roads, and whoever was driving certain to tromp a lead foot when and where radar detector allowed…
“When we read between the lines of all the hype and conjecture,” Price suddenly said, “the so-called Force of Truth seems to think the European Space Agency is behind what they’re referring to as a coming ‘litmus test for the dawn of advanced space weapons.’ Nuclear test sites in remote areas, human test subjects to measure the effects of fallout and so forth, though they didn’t name Queensland.”
“And they’re putting all this out on their Web sites? These guys know something we don’t, or damn well should?”
Price shrugged. “They lay out a list of self-educated theories based on clandestine investigation, which translates to hacking classified government files. Some of it is public knowledge, but some of what they say is backed by truth they had no business learning and that could well undermine national security. Most of what they cite regards a conspiracy on the part of the U.S. military industrial complex and its loosely affiliated collaborators.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask, but I need to know what we’re dealing with here. What’s the conspiracy?” Brognola asked.
“Bottom line, the common man is a slave to the great economic tyrant,” Price said.
“The what?”
“The GET, sometimes referred to as the one world tyrant. This would be the White House, Pentagon, all U.S. military contractors and intelligence agencies. They include the mighty at the top of the heap on Wall Street, the United Nations and its criminal lackeys, and on down to Hollywood and the mass media—all of the aforementioned nothing else but the world’s slavedrivers in their craving for more money, more power and dominion and, of course, receiving the homage due them by we, the peasants. According to the Force of Truth, most of us have no hope, no future, no reason to live other than to serve and obey the GET. To roughly paraphrase, we are but chaff to be dispersed into the wind of fate as the GET would see fit, how our passing suffering subhuman existence is only useful where it all better serves the GET. The GET, according to the Force of Truth, is a pale shade of the Antichrist to come,” Price reported.
Kurtzman picked up the ball. “I have to tell you, Hal, one even glances at the history of man on this planet you can see where their argument is mighty convincing and carries some weight. To them—and others who subscribe to their philosophy—the average working stiffs are just dupes, pawns.”
Brognola grunted. “Right. So. We sit back and wait to see what Able turns up after they put this Force of Truth under the spotlight and Carl’s always-ready diplomatic hammer. And with no word from either Striker,” he said, referring to Bolan, “or Phoenix…”
“We wait,” Price said.
Brognola felt the tension thicken as he read their dark mood in the silence. “Yeah,” the big Fed exhorted. “What can we do, huh? Other than hold tight and keep our fingers crossed that our people turn up answers that could lead them to burning down our European space friends who may or may not be armed with nuclear satellites. Or some renegade black program the ESA may or may not have and who is trying to tell us they’re the new bullies on the global block. Last, but hardly least, not to mention locking horns with any number of ops from any alphabet-soup agency, and that our people may be forced to kill operators on the home team.”
Kurtzman clenched his jaw and said, “Supposedly on the home team. And yeah, that’s about where we stand.”
Brognola heaved a breath. He told them to go ahead and rehash what they knew, hoping they’d overlooked some critical detail. No matter how professional, how many past victories under the belt, the day an intelligence operator began thinking he knew it all was the day he should quit, before he got himself or someone else killed. He decided to hold off informing them about the piece of strange material that had rendered a man nearly invisible to night vision. It had been sent on by Justice courier to the FBI forensic specialists in Quantico. This was the second time that someone tried to gain the upper hand by developing a fabric that rendered its wearer nearly invisible.
The big Fed eased farther in his chair and worked at his cigar, but he was hardly relaxed as Kurtzman launched into the rehash.