Fort Belvoir North, Springfield, Virginia
November 11, 7:45 A.M.
Chase Williams had always been an early riser. That had not just been true during his military career, where it was enforced, but also since coming to Washington, D.C. The sixty-one-year-old lived alone at the Watergate and commuted to Virginia. As much as he had little patience for the speed bumps of bureaucracy, he also disliked traffic.
Rising with the sun gave him time to do push-ups and jumping jacks in its comforting orange glow. Then he would shower quickly, put on a seasonal suit, make a thermos of coffee—the vending machine at the DLA was sinister in operation, refusing bills as if it suspected they were all counterfeit—and drive on relatively empty roads.
And there was something ironic about arriving at his new place of employment as the new sun still caused the walls of the building to glow with angelic innocence. Williams imagined that God was in on the joke. The DLA was anything but.
Built on the site of what was once a plantation, and named for the first director of the Defense Logistics Agency, Lieutenant General Andrew T. McNamara, U.S. Army, the nine five-story structures that comprise the McNamara Headquarters Complex are part of the sprawling Fort Belvoir complex. Among other assets, the base includes Davison Army Airfield, tactically located just fifteen miles southwest of Washington, D.C.
A division of the Department of Defense, the DLA is a cornerstone for global combat support, both open-warfare and covert activities. That constant, busy, roiling function is belied by the serenity of the setting. The buildings form an embracing semicircle that includes a large reflecting pool as well as tennis and basketball courts. The façades of the bottom two floors are white, the higher floors are reddish brick. By design, the overall impression is that of a college campus, a home of theory and think tanks, not action.
One of the first things Chase Williams discovered when he came to work here—using the president’s own access codes—was that the DLA had active files for the assassination of every major political, military, and theocratic terrorist on Earth. Most of those he knew about. What he had not known was that every category had domestic targets. They were not necessarily enemies of the nation or the executive branch. These were culled—“hacked,” as Matt Berry put it—from the black ops groups in this very building.
Many of these files were updated daily. That included a slim dossier on Mohammad Obeid ibn Sadi, a Houthi terror financier who was ancillary to Williams’s own first mission here.
Not now, but one day, was the note attached to the file. The note was signed B—Matt Berry, the deputy chief of staff to outgoing President Wyatt Midkiff. Berry was the man responsible for moving Williams, the one-man Op-Center, to his new home here. A hard-nosed, pragmatic, unimaginative, self-interested pain in the ass, Berry was nonetheless one of Williams’s biggest boosters.
Williams knew from his tenure at the original Op-Center that the DLA was rumored to be the federal government’s largest repository of black ops and dark ops activities. It was said—very quietly—that Director Stephanie Hill had more power than anyone in government, including the president. Hill was not hobbled by the high profile and accountability hurdles of the commander in chief.
There was a reason for the secrecy. The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency were populated with deep state leakers, anarchists, contrarians, and spies. Because of that, the DLA did not truly exist as a unit with a broad command structure. Beneath Hill and her few deputies, no one knew anyone else.
Williams was neither naïve nor shockable. His career embraced thirty-five years of military service, most of it at Pacific Command and Central Command. For the last five years he had run the National Crisis Management Center—informally known as Op-Center. His dozens of team members had operated lawlessly at times, and lethally on occasion. So had he, himself. Williams never went to confession over any of it.
His late wife, Janette, whom he had lost to ovarian cancer, had been his confessor, when one was needed.
His personal and professional mission had always been to protect these United States from injury. He had done so, putting America before both of those, professional advancement and personal safety. He had sacrificed the approval of his rivals at the FBI and CIA, or even the security of his field personnel. Some of them had paid with their lives.
Still, the Op-Center based at the DLA was nothing like the Op-Center that Williams had been running until eleven weeks before. As Berry called it, Op-Center 2.0 had invited a certain necessary tedium to set in. Williams was one of thousands of sets of eyes that watched Web sites and data to make sure the homeland was safe.
The frustrating truth of it, though—the thing that kept Williams from settling in or enjoying the work—was that he did not understand why he was doing it. The deeper reason. Berry had to have one. So far, nothing the deputy chief of staff had said struck him as even remotely honest, let alone transparent.
Williams knew that the need for Op-Center to go into action was limited to jobs no one else wanted to be caught doing. It wasn’t that Delta Force or SEAL Team Six feared any mission. The opposite was true. But the charters of those and other units were the same as their parent forces.
In short, they played by certain rules. What he understood was that officially, the Op-Center team Black Wasp did not exist. Restrictions did not apply. They were so no-profile, in fact, that Williams had no contact with them. He knew that after their first and so far only mission the three members of the team had moved from their separate commands to Fort Belvoir. However, at Berry’s instructions, he was not to have any communication unless and until they had a mission.
“Less chance of anyone recognizing you and asking who, what, why questions about them,” Berry had said. “If they know the president gave you a personal combat team, they’d all want one.”
That made some sense, but not entirely. Williams had command skills the team could probably use. Why had those been carved away?
Maybe that was part of the plan, he had wondered. To keep the two key combatants as semi-loose cannons. That was part of what had been baked into this experiment. Berry had once described Black Wasp as an autonomous collective.
“Or, as it is referred to in the argot, a ‘situational command,’” Major Breen had said when they met. SITCOM was an apt enough acronym. Rank had nominal sway. The members were three soldiers with specific skills working together. Any of them could make a command decision, for him or herself, at will.
It had worked on the first mission. But that was the only empirical data they possessed.
Not a deep sample on which to build a policy, but then they—and I—am expendable the first time it doesn’t work, Williams reflected.
The veteran commander was still adjusting to his new reality. He had gone from being a leader of a vitally integrated team to being the sole employee of an Op-Center that was now a subsidiary line item in the budget earmarked for logistical export support. That cost was folded into the Executive Branch Discretionary Fund, a so-called “exploratory budget” that was conveniently requisitioned and approved by the same person, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“It’s like being buried in a tomb built of UNICEF pennies,” he had told Berry when they met over drinks for their weekly face-to-face.
The younger man did not get the reference.
“Halloween,” Williams had explained. “Orange milk containers. You’d collect coins with your candy to help needy children around the world.”
“Ah,” Berry had said. “The ones who grew up to hate us?”
“I can’t answer for them,” Williams had replied. “I was raised to do the right thing.”
Nonetheless, the image stuck: a penny from one trick-or-treater, a penny from another, and you had enough milk for a dozen kids. A dollar from one line item, a penny from another, and soon you had an annual operating budget for Chase Williams’s new Op-Center. Most of that money went back into the DLA system to pay for the office overhead. Berry called it “dark financing,” officially known as zero-sum operational expenditures.
“That way,” Berry had said, “the DLA never has to rely on congressional funding for ongoing operations. Ms. Hill uses each new allocation to expand her power base.”
So Williams was buried alive, but he was all right with that. He was single, he had no interest in retirement, and he was always up for new challenges. He was not just undercover but he was underground, in a clean, efficient, well-lit but windowless basement. He spent his days reviewing intelligence data, largely without human interaction. He missed his team, their input, their quirks, their smarts. Everyone he had met here in the corridors and at the vending machines was pleasant in a neutral sort of way. The used words like “hello” and “good morning” smartly and with a smile. But he could never tell if they were having a good day or managing a global crisis.
For some of these operators-perdu, he imagined that an end-of-the-world scenario probably was a good day.
Outside his defiantly open door, the crescent-shaped central corridor of the basement level matched the curve of the building. It was uncommonly quiet today, as most of the people here had just learned of the crash of a passenger jet over the Southern Indian Ocean. Given the subantarctic location, Williams was not surprised that the mainstream media had very little information about the event. The only “certain status,” as the Federal Aviation Administration called crash details, was that it had happened, and that no reports on fatalities, possible causes, or crewmembers had been issued.
Terrorism had not been ruled out, though it seemed unlikely. South Africa was not on any global terrorism map, save for the sporadic activities of ISIS cells in Durban. And those were typically jihadi sympathizers who were looking to launch attacks outside the nation. And taking down a plane to kill one passenger was tactically more complicated than a car bomb or shooting.
Even as he considered that possibility, the passenger manifest came up on his computer. There were no red flags. Johannesburg to Perth was not a route political activists, religious radicals, or hostile journalists tended to travel. Military commanders did not usually fly commercial.
What kept most of the intelligence and DLA personnel at their desks was no doubt the same material that Williams had just received from Matt Berry. It had originated from the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau and had been shared with all networked agencies. Which meant that, by now, everyone in Washington and the media had it.
The item was an audio file, the recording of a 911 call from Joseph Lewein in Manhattan. The message had a time stamp of 9:16 A.M.—just minutes after the crash and too soon for him to have seen, heard, or read about it anywhere.
Williams listened with headphones that kept any external noise out and internal sound in.
Dispatch: Nine-one-one, what’s your—
Lewein: My name is Joseph Lewein and I think … I’m sure something is wrong, badly wrong. I was—
Dispatch: Mr. Lewein, where are you calling from?
Lewein: Huh? 330 West Forty-fifth Street, apartment 5K, but that doesn’t matter! I was video sharing a movie with my uncle Bernard on South African flight—Christ, what’s the number? It’s two eighty, I think. He was traveling from Johannesburg to Perth and we were watching—Doesn’t matter. He suddenly started convulsing!
Dispatch: Sir, is this an emergency at your loca—
Lewein: No! I’m reporting some kind of emergency on the plane. I don’t have the FAA on frickin’ speed dial! I saw my uncle coughing blood and then his tablet must’ve fallen because then I saw a woman throwing up—blood, guts. I heard everyone choking and screaming!
Dispatch: All right, sir? I need you to calm down and tell me—
Lewein: I can’t calm down and I am telling you! I saw an oxygen mask hanging down! There was a ton of blood on the seat!
Dispatch: Sir, I need you to tell me if you are reporting a terror incident. If so, I will send officers of the Strategic Response—
Lewein: Goddammit, I don’t need help! It’s not me! It’s a plane that went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean! Christ! Idiot! Connect me with the FBI or Homeland Security. Get me someone, anyone who can do something! To hell with this—
The caller hung up. That was the entire recording.
Less than a minute after Williams finished listening to it, Matt Berry called on the secure landline. Williams closed the door before answering. He had rarely done that at the old Op-Center office.
“Good morning, Chase,” Berry said. “What do you make of it?”
“Same as you, I imagine. Terror attack—usual MO, early in the flight and out of an airport that’s been quiet for years, maybe a little lax with security.”
“Cause of deaths?”
“From the apparent speed, I would say a biological agent—ricin, maybe Clostridium botulinum.”
“Not a gas?”
“Not likely,” Williams said. “It would require too much to conceal in a carry-on, and if you want to ventilate it through the aircraft—it takes access and time to set up before takeoff. Acoustic analysis will probably find nothing underlying the normal sound of the vents.”
“But the fast-acting biotoxins aren’t airborne, and they don’t act uniformly.”
“No.”
“Then it’s got to be something else,” Berry said.
“What about the baggage handlers?”
“Airports Company South Africa is looking at that,” Berry said, adding, “though we’d like to get the FBI over there, establish better relations.”
“Not doing more to end apartheid is a big cross to bear,” Williams said.
“So was wiping out Indians and ignoring the Holocaust and—let’s not go down that road.”
“Sorry,” Williams said in earnest. “Just some context. I asked about the handlers because a radiological agent in someone’s luggage might have caused something like the caller described.”
“They’ve got radiation scanners at Oliver Tambo International. But—good point. I’ll make sure they were operational.”
“It needn’t have been onboard,” Williams added. “It could have been a cloud from an aboveground test or nuclear leak.”
“Uh-uh,” Berry said. “There was nothing like that anywhere in the flight path.”
“Then maybe a Russian or Chinese satellite with a plutonium power source failed to reach orbit, penetrated the cabin.”
“Imaginative, Chase, but what’s that—a billion-to-one chance?” Berry said. “Besides, the NRO, the air force, even NASA would have detected something like that.”
“National Reconnaissance Office shift-changes at eight A.M.,” Williams said. “Maybe someone was getting coffee. Or checking the classifieds.”
Williams was only half joking. More and more, computers were being programmed to watch—and catch—the large volume of data streaming in from satellites, listening stations, computer hacks, and human intelligence. A rocket abort, particularly a domestic satellite—and not necessarily Russian or Chinese, but Indian or Japanese—might not attract careful scrutiny.
“I’ll make sure that didn’t happen,” Berry said. “Meantime, I’ll be kicking over whatever we learn about the flight. Midkiff is phoning President Omotoso to offer condolences and resources—I may learn something then.”
“I’m sure you’ll have the passenger list and security footage under a microscope,” Williams said. “I’d like to look into external factors.”
“Seems unlikely—other planes use the route.”
“All the more reason to rule it out,” Williams said.
Berry considered that. “I need your instincts more than your skills. Have at it.”
“Do we have eyes on the region?” Williams asked.
“SoPo7 is being turned in that direction,” Berry said, referring to the polar-orbit climate satellite. “First image it took was dead barn swallows on a mountain—should be able to tell us something.”
“You are a font of bizarre information.”
“It impresses the ladies,” Berry said. “I’ll let you know when there’s something new,” he added, then hung up.
Williams thumbed off his phone. As always between the two, a moment of tension could be forgiven by a moment of levity. Still, Williams felt a little guilty for having goaded him. He had been responding to an impatience in Berry’s voice—stronger than usual—and it had nothing to do with the plane crash. The minds of every functionary in Washington—including Berry, and including the NRO—were focused on finding employment. Midkiff had been president for two terms and his party was voted out of office less than a week before. Like every president-elect, Pennsylvania Governor John Wright would be bringing in his own people.
Berry himself would be unemployed in less than seven weeks and Williams couldn’t help but wonder if the new Op-Center had been set up partly so Williams could hire the soon-to-be-ex–deputy chief of staff.
Not that I would mind giving him this desk and going back out with Black Wasp, he thought. As dangerous as that mission had been, it had the qualities of challenge and purpose that had first drawn him to a military career.
Pouring black coffee from his thermos, Williams opened the door and went back to work. He did not go to the linked databases of the organizations that had already reported in. Instead, he went to the daily reports filed by U.S. Geological Survey. Despite Berry’s assurances, he looked for seismic activity that might indicate nuclear tests anywhere along the air currents near the plane.
There was nothing.
Williams next went to the weekly updates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Winds crossing the airliner’s path at 35,000 feet would have been the Cape Horn Current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and the Falkland Current—westerlies just after takeoff, easterlies when they went down. There were nuclear power plants along all three, from South Africa to the Falklands.
“The path is right, and there’s enough distance for radioactivity to rise,” he thought aloud.
Assuming, of course, there had been a leak.
He went to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission alerts. There were notes beside every power plant on the planet. There were no reports of difficulty at any plant along those southerly currents.
That was it for the nuclear option.
He went back to the USGS file. His geology training consisted of a single semester as an undergrad at Tufts, but he remembered that the region was volcanic and that volcanoes released a variety of gases into the atmosphere.
“Maybe a quick, freak incident jetted—what, methane?—into the air? It got sucked in by the engines?”
There was no volcanic activity anywhere that fit with the atmospheric patterns. He accessed NASA’s Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment, which circles the Earth taking tens of thousands of images. After each orbit, the artificial intelligence program on Earth analyzed those images, compared them to the previous pass, and created streams of data concerning observational changes.
This morning, the ASE had spotted an “anomaly” on Prince Edward Island—about three hours before the jetliner would have been taking off from Johannesburg.
He clicked the link to a satellite image. It showed a white dot on the northern side of the island, no explanation. It clearly was not an eruption of some kind.
“What the hell is a white dot?”
Williams went through an up-to-the-minute file from the space agency’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, which failed to show a similar anomaly. He then went to the databases of other land-scanning satellites and found no corroborating or explanatory information. He went back one day, two days—there were no obvious “traumatic events,” as they were classified, such as a rock fall, a chunk of space debris striking land or water in the region, or Chinese artillery tests—though he did see a handful of boats near the coast in DNI surveillance, none of them anchored at the nearest natural harbor. He grabbed and saved those images, sent them to Berry for analysis. If the Chinese or Russians were using fishing boats or science vessels as fronts down there it was something worth noting.
But it did not help the current investigation.
This process reminded him of the poker games he used to play with Op-Center’s senior staff. Whenever intelligence director Roger McCord had the deal, he would offer a running commentary.
“No help there … busted … denied.…”
The imaginary McCord was right. This wasn’t solving the problem of the crash. That was when he came up with a better idea.
Looking at the time on his phone, Williams searched for a contact and then punched the phone icon.