Act of War

CHAPTER TWO

The Pacific Ocean, thirty kilometers west of the Golden Gate Bridge,

San Francisco, California

The next morning

The Gibraltar-flagged cargo ship King Zoser rode at five knots, barely enough to maintain steerageway, in choppy three-to four-meter seas, with waves and wind combining to keep the decks perpetually damp and the men angry. Most of them were manning the starboard rail, either puking or trying to, when the Coast Guard Barracuda-class patrol boat Stingray finally approached.

The King Zoser was a six-thousand-ton cargo ship, heavily laden and lying very low in the heaving water. It had two thirty-meter-tall cranes that could each sling as much as a hundred tons out to fifty meters over the side, making it one of the few older ships on the high seas able to load and offload itself without extensive shore equipment. Its twin nine thousand horsepower diesels propelled it as fast as twenty knots, although it rarely did more than fifteen. It had a ship’s complement of about fifty men and could stay at sea for as long as three weeks.

The Stingray launched a large fast intercept craft from its stern ramp, with three two-person inspection teams, four security officers, the detail commander, and a records officer, plus three K-9s that would accompany the inspection teams. The intercept boat had a .50 caliber machine gun mounted in front, and another Coast Guardsman with an M-16 rifle beside the helmsman. Once alongside the steel-runged ladder on the starboard side of the cargo ship, the boarding party tied off and began climbing the ladder up the vessel’s gray slab hull. The K-9s hopped into large canvas backpacks and were carried up the ladder to the deck.

A Coast Guard lieutenant was the first up the ladder. He nodded formally to the man who approached. The captain of the King Zoser saluted brusquely with two fingers of his right hand. “You are either very brave or very foolhardy,” the man said loudly to make himself heard over the swirling winds, “to board a vessel like this in such rough seas. You would have been better advised to wait until we reached the harbor.”

“Lieutenant Matthew Wilson, executive officer of the Coast Guard patrol vessel Stingray,” the officer responded, returning the captain’s salute. “Operating in such sea conditions is routine for us, sir.”

“Is that so?” The captain sniffed. “I am Yusuf Gemici, master of this vessel. I trust this will not take long. I have a schedule to keep, and I have been at sea for over two weeks.”

“I have checked your manifest filed with the U.S. government,” Wilson said. “All is in order, so this is just a routine prescreening. My headquarters has notified the harbormaster at Richmond that you will be delayed for a routine inspection. Your berth will be waiting for you whenever you arrive. We’ll try not to detain you too long, sir.”

Gemici sniffed again, obviously his signal that he didn’t believe what he was being told. “Very well. You may proceed.”

“I have eleven crew members and three dogs to perform our inspection,” Wilson went on. “We require access to all spaces, berths, and holds. I request one crew member accompany my search teams in order to expedite movement through your vessel. Any crew members we find belowdecks who are not at required duty stations will be detained by my search teams and may be placed under arrest. Do you understand, sir?”

“More delays,” Gemici growled. Wilson looked as if he expected an argument; the master thought it better to change his tone. “Yes, I understand.”

“This is Chief Petty Officer Ralph Steadman, my noncommissioned officer in charge of this detail,” Wilson said, motioning behind him without taking his eyes off the captain, his voice a bit more authoritative now. “If you have any specific questions about this search, you may ask him at any time.”

Gemici looked the CPO over and decided he did not want to get on this man’s bad side. Steadman said nothing and did not offer any greeting, obviously not in a diplomatic mood. He carried an M-16 on a shoulder sling and a sidearm and wore a bulletproof vest under his orange life jacket—obviously Wilson was the good guy, Steadman the bad. The rest of the search teams were likewise heavily armed and outfitted, with stern, determined, no-nonsense expressions. The recent attack in Houston had obviously altered many attitudes about securing the homeland.

“I have no questions,” the skipper said. “My crew will cooperate in any way possible.”

“Very good,” Wilson said. “If you can lead me to the bridge, sir, I would like to inspect your logbooks, then meet with the crew to check their documents and address any immigration issues.”

“I understand. Buyurunuz.” Gemici used a walkie-talkie and assigned some men to take the search teams where they wanted to go. As they spread out, Gemici noticed the Coast Guardsmen activating small black boxes attached to their life jackets. “What are those devices, Lieutenant?”

“Radiation detectors, sir,” Wilson replied.

“Ah. The attack on your port city of Houston, Texas. Terrible. Terrible.” He spat overboard, being careful to do so with the wind. “Such crazed terrorists hurt all without regard. I curse them all.” Wilson said nothing, but activated his own detection device. “I have been at sea for many days,” he reminded Wilson.

“We’re not singling you out for any particular reason, sir,” Wilson said. “All vessels entering major U.S. ports will be inspected several times before they are allowed to offload their cargo; any vessels already in port will be inspected as well.”

“Evet, anliyorum,” Gemici said, sniffing. “I understand.”

Chief Petty Officer Steadman had gone down to the main deck to check in with the above-deck search team, which was inspecting hundreds of tons of steel pipe and massive house-sized oil field transfer pumps chained to the deck. After asking about their progress, Steadman checked a few of the articles on deck himself. The straight pieces were open and easy to inspect, but the angled pipes and pump flanges were closed with steel security caps, bolted in place and the bolts and nuts sealed by local customs officials with numbered steel wires and lead seals that passed through the bolts, which prevented the nuts from being removed without detection. On an oil pipe with over fifty bolts on it, Steadman checked every third or fourth bolt to save time, examining the seal for the proper registration number and gently tugging on the wire to make sure it was not broken.

After reporting that the above-deck inspection was almost completed, Steadman went belowdecks to check his other inspection teams. These inspections were drier and warmer but not any easier. The usual procedure was to walk slowly up and down the passageways, picking every third or fourth cabin, storage space, or berth to enter and inspect, plus any other suspicious-looking areas such as freezers, flammable-liquid storage areas, and overhead drop ceilings. Each Coast Guard inspection team was briefed daily on the latest intelligence and results of recent searches, which usually provided clues to areas on which to concentrate a search: sometimes patterns emerged, such as using broken-down equipment, “malfunctioning” engines, or spaces with lots of corrosive chemicals in it to throw off a dog’s scent. Searchers were trained to look up as well as look down; they also learned that items were hidden in plain sight as often as they were hidden in the most obnoxious, darkest, smelliest, untouchable places.

As the chief petty officer and senior enlisted man in the inspection team, Steadman tried to show his support for his men by picking the noisiest, smelliest, nastiest places to do his own inspection, which usually meant the propulsion and steering mechanical spaces. But after twenty minutes of careful searching, nothing else showed up. Steadman examined some firefighting equipment that he thought looked odd—finger-to-shoulder heat-resistant gloves, hooded respirator, heat-protective coat, and thick heat-resistant boots, all in a new locker located outside the engine rooms. It was all fairly new and rather high-tech for this ship; only one man, the engineer’s mate, had the key—unusual again, since it might be important for every watch stander to have that key in case of emergency. Steadman made a mental note and moved on.

“Got another weather report from the ship—winds gusting above fifty knots,” Wilson radioed to Steadman after he reported his search of the engine rooms was completed. “Unless you have something special, let’s wrap this up before we’re stuck on this bad boy.”

“Copy.” It was almost time to wrap this search up—but not before he tried one last time to stir up some shit.

Each engine room was supposed to have just one watch stander and one oiler during this inspection, but upon entering the port side engine room, Steadman found a third crewman who was listening to a Walkman and smoking a foul-smelling hand-rolled cigarette, taking some readings from an electrical panel. Without any warning, Steadman pressed the man face-first up against the panel. “Don’t move!” he ordered, placing him in plastic handcuffs. The man was about to struggle, but quickly thought better of it and offered no resistance.

Steadman brought the suspect up to the bridge, still in handcuffs, and his papers were handed to Wilson. “Do you speak English?” Wilson asked.

“Yes.”

He looked carefully at the man’s eyes, then asked him, “Name?”

“Boroshev. Gennadyi Vladomirivich.”

Wilson examined the man’s documents, then turned to the skipper. “Most of your crew is Turkish and Egyptian, but this man is Russian.”

“We have crew members from all over.”

“We asked that only two crewmen remain in each space during the inspection. Why did this man disobey the order?”

“I do not know. Perhaps he thought he was the one who should stay.”

Wilson’s face remained stony, and his eyes locked first on Boroshev’s, then Gemici’s. Both men remained impassive. Wilson radioed in a request for a records check on Boroshev. Like most of the other crew members, his passport and seaman’s license were in horrendous condition, difficult to read and badly weathered. “Skipper, you know that the United States has regulations on the condition of official documents,” he said. “These papers are virtually unreadable. Any documents in this bad a condition will have to be replaced before shore leave for those individuals can be approved.”

“My men are professionals, sir,” Gemici said. “They know the rules, and if they fail to follow them, they must suffer the consequences.” He shook a finger at Boroshev. “Shore leave for you is not approved until suitable replacement documents arrive—which will probably not be on this trip.” Boroshev said nothing, but bowed his head, ashamed of being scolded in front of the American.

“We’ll request a replacement set through the San Francisco consulate—they might have temporary documents waiting for you at your port stop in Victoria,” Wilson offered.

“Bremerton,” Gemici corrected him.

Wilson made a show of checking the manifest, but Gemici was sure he knew his schedule by heart. “Yes, sir. Bremerton,” Wilson said. He stayed very close to Boroshev, putting his radiation detector right in the guy’s face as he scanned as much of his body as possible. The guy was too confused to look nervous. Wilson made a show of staring at the man’s eyes carefully. “This man’s pupils look dilated—pretty unusual for someone who was belowdecks and then outside. “You do drugs, Gennadyi?” He made a tokeing motion with two fingers up to pursed lips. “You like the weed, Gennadyi?”

“No, sir.” A hint of perspiration appeared on his forehead. “I…seasick. Very seasick.”

“Seasick, huh?” He stared at the sweat popping out of his forehead, then glared at Gemici. “You approve of your crewmen using marijuana for seasickness, skipper?”

“My men are professionals, Lieutenant,” Gemici repeated. “While on this ship, their responsibilities are to their captain, their fellow crew members, their ship, their cargo, and themselves, in that order. As long as they do the job, I do not ask questions.”

“What you do on your ship is your business, Captain,” Wilson said, “but if any drugs leave the ship while you’re in an American port, you could be in danger of having your ship and its cargo confiscated.” After a negative watch list message came back from the Stingray, Wilson cut off Boroshev’s plastic handcuffs with a folding knife. “A word to the wise.”

“Yes, sir. I will take care of it.”

A short time later, Steadman radioed to Wilson that they had finished inspecting the ship, checked and verified the crew, and the inspection team assembled on deck awaiting orders. Wilson ordered them to start boarding their intercept boat to return to the Stingray, then held out his hand to the skipper. “Thank you very much for your cooperation, sir,” he said to Gemici. “I hope the rest of your trip is safe and successful.”

The skipper sniffed but shook hands anyway. “You be careful riding that little boat of yours back to your patrol vessel, Lieutenant,” he said with a toothy smile. “Gunaydin. Have a nice day.” Wilson nodded, saluted, and was the last man down the ladder. With not some small amount of difficulty, the fast intercept craft detached from the cargo ship and finally rendezvoused with the patrol boat; in very short time the Coast Guard vessel was headed back to shore.

The bottom line, Gemici thought, as he made his way back down to the main deck with Boroshev silently behind him, is that there was simply no way any government agency could search every square centimeter of a ship that was over three hundred meters long and weighed more than six thousand tons. The major items on any inspection—the manifest, the logs, the crew, the cargo, and a visual inspection—could be anticipated and handled easily. Everything else that happened was by pure chance. But the odds favored the smugglers, not the inspectors. Unless they dry-docked this ship and cut it apart with torches, plus emptied out every container and cut open every piece of cargo larger than a suitcase, any skilled smuggler could hide thousands of kilos of anything—or hundreds of men—in it.

Case in point: The chain locker in the bow of the King Zoser. In most ships, the chain locker and anchor mechanical spaces were in the very forward part of the bow; during an inspection, it was a simple matter to open the door, see the tons of chain and the huge electric winches, and move on. They had even put in false walls to make it appear that the hull was sloping in as expected. But there was yet another compartment forward of the chain locker, accessible only through the false walls, that was even bigger than the chain locker.

Gemici looked mad enough to chew nails as they arrived at the chain locker. Boroshev was nursing the abrasions on his wrists from the handcuffs, and he looked as wobbly and dazed as ever. “You stupid ass!” the captain shouted at him in Russian. “Didn’t you hear the announcement that the American Coast Guard was approaching and preparing to board us? You could have…”

In a flash of movement, Boroshev’s left hand whipped out and slapped Gemici full in the face, hard enough to make the captain stagger backward. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, you old donkey-fucker!” he roared. “You may be the captain of this tub, but you are not my commanding officer!”

The captain wiped blood from his mouth. “Do you think that smoking dope right before entering American waters was a good idea, Boroshev?” The Russian didn’t answer. Instead he pounded on the steel bulkhead at the rear of the chain locker with a code tap, and moments later the wall started to move.

“About fucking time!” a soldier inside said in Russian, lowering his shotgun. “It’s freezing cold in there!”

“Shut up and go check the pumps and the uppermost pressure relief U-pipe on deck—they opened both of them up for an inspection,” Boroshev said. “Scan for listening devices.” The man nodded and hurried off. Boroshev issued more orders, and one by one another nineteen men hidden in the false room inside the chain locker filed out.

“They had radiation detectors, every one of them,” Gemici said. “What in hell are we carrying? What is in those pumps?”

“Your job is to get us and our equipment to Richmond, not to ask questions,” Boroshev said. “We have all used the highest level of security. Believe me, the less you know, the better.”

Gemici looked skeptical. “Tell me, Boroshev. I won’t tell another soul. Drugs? Weapons? Money? If the Americans come back, I should…”

“I said no questions. Don’t worry about the damned Americans. They left, didn’t they?”

“You think they’d try to arrest us all if they found something? They’d get off the ship, alert the entire U.S. Navy, and surround us.”

Boroshev hesitated, licking his lips apprehensively, but finally shrugged. “Well, it would be the shits to come all this way and get caught within sight of our objective,” he said, “but that’s the way it goes. But I’m telling you, we’re fine. As long as we find any bugs they may have planted, and we stay on the lookout for aerial surveillance anytime we’re on deck, everything will be fine.”

“They found your private locker too. They made the engineer’s mate open it.”

“They didn’t take anything, did they?” Boroshev shook his head. “You see? If they found anything critical, they would have seized this ship, I’m sure of it. You worry too much, you old hen. The Americans are not stupid: after the Houston bombing, they are on full alert. We can expect their security to get tighter as we get closer to port, but if we stay cool everything will be fine. When do we get out of this rough water?”

“We’ll be in U.S. waters in about two hours,” Gemici replied. “We’ll take on a pilot entering the bay, probably have to undergo another inspection—we should be in San Pablo Bay in three to four hours. They’ll make us anchor in the bay overnight, and then we should be allowed to dock sometime the next day. We should clear customs a couple hours afterward, and then start offloading the shipment.”

“Good,” Boroshev said. “We’ll check for bugs, but I tell you, we’re fine. Good job.”

Gemici was worried, but in the end he didn’t really care. His job was to get the package onto the wharf in Richmond, California; Boroshev’s job was to get it to its destination, wherever that was. When the pumps and whatever they contained hit the trailer beds and the men stepped foot on the wharf, the money would hit Gemici’s Cayman Islands bank account. Then, Boroshev was on his own.

“Let’s get out of here, dammit, I’m freezing,” Boroshev said, patting Gemici on the shoulder. “Another few days, and you’ll be finished. Then we’ll be on our way back to Alexandria or Damascus or anyplace warm.”

Gemici nodded and left the chain locker. Boroshev was right behind him, but stopped and grasped the arm of one of his men who was waiting nearby. “Those radiation shields were all in place, weren’t they?” he asked in Russian.

“Yes, sir,” the soldier responded. “We checked the readings carefully for leakage. They’re secure.”

Boroshev nodded, silently hoping that was true. “Very well. Carry on.”

The Americans were making it tougher and tougher to infiltrate their borders, Boroshev thought as he made his way topside to join the captain, but they had anticipated this and were ready. They’d passed their first test that day—or so it seemed. They had a few more tests to go, but they were that much closer to their ultimate objective.

The White House, Washington, D.C.

The next morning

Robert Chamberlain strode through the door to the Oval Office with a single folder in his hand. The President was at his desk, with his chief of staff, Victoria Collins, looking over his shoulder. “What’s up, Robert?” the President asked. He saw the folder Chamberlain had in his hand. “Comments on the speech?”

“Mr. President, do you really mean to say this?” Chamberlain asked incredulously. “This part about asking folks to go on with their lives?”

Victoria Collins blinked in surprise. Collins was a former college track and field star, Fortune 500 CEO, and two-term Illinois senator. As the first female ever to hold the office of chief of staff, she was very comfortable in the rough-and-tumble world of politics and had been in plenty of high-stress situations in her ground-breaking career; her presidential aspirations were well known to the entire nation. “Exactly what do you recommend we say to the American people, Robert—run and hide in your homes because we can’t handle the situation?”

“Exactly the opposite—I think we should be telling the American people to offer their services and help in this time of crisis,” Chamberlain responded. “I think we should tell them that they should step forward and do everything they can to help their nation and their neighbors get through this crisis.”

“What?” Collins cried. “What do you expect them to do—pick up a rifle and go hunt terrorists in their backyards?”

“I would like all retired civil servants to go back to their old jobs and volunteer to help,” Chamberlain suggested. “We will need thousands of new background security checks, baggage screeners, record checkers, instructors, and countless more jobs done in the coming months, and we simply don’t have the manpower or the money to hire and train new personnel. The budget is already blown through the roof, and our existing employees are already overworked. We need help, and the best solution is to ask for volunteers.”

“This is crazy, Robert!” Collins retorted. “They’ll think we’re out of control. And who will retrain the retired guys?”

“The current trainers will, of course,” Chamberlain replied. “It’ll be more of a recertification rather than a full-blown initial training program, since they already know their business. They will…”

“And you expect these people to volunteer to do this?” Collins asked. “Why should they? They put in twenty or thirty years in their job, they have a good pension, a comfortable retirement…you think they’ll respond to a call to leave their comfortable lives and return to those jobs for no pay?”

“I think they will, enthusiastically and in large numbers—if we ask them,” Chamberlain said. “Mr. President, that’s why this speech is so important. After 9/11, the message was ‘Don’t panic, be aware, be vigilant, but go about your normal lives because otherwise the terrorists win.’ It was a good sentiment, but it was the wrong message. The last thing we want is for Americans to go about their lives as if nothing has happened.”

“You’re inviting panic, confusion, chaos, and a tremendous backlash against this administration, Chamberlain…”

“Nothing like the panic and confusion there would be, Miss Collins, if we didn’t do anything and there was another nuclear terrorist attack in the States,” Chamberlain said. “Look, it’s simple: We need the help, but we can’t afford to hire half a million new civil servants. We inspect ten percent of containerized cargo coming into our ports right now. What if Congress orders us to inspect even fifty percent? It’ll take at least five times the manpower we have now! Who’s going to do the background checks for all those people? Who’s going to train them? Who’s going to train the trainers or check the checkers?”

“But you’re suggesting that volunteers do it?”

“Exactly,” Chamberlain said. “These retired and former civil servants, military personnel, teachers, and experts know their business. We can rescreen then, recertify them, and let them work their old jobs when they want. We gain a new pool of help for very little additional cost.

“But more important, we communicate to the American people that we are at war,” he went on. “Telling the people to go about their lives as if nothing has happened doesn’t convey the sense of danger or urgency we need if we want to go forward eventually with a declaration of war…”

“You obviously didn’t get my memo,” Collins said. “The staff attorneys for the White House, State, Justice, and Defense all are recommending that the President not go to Congress to ask for a declaration of war against terrorism. There’s no legal or historical precedent for it, and it would be too unpopular and politically dangerous…”

“I read the memo, Vicki, and it stinks,” Chamberlain snapped. “It’s incomplete and based on opinion only, not on hard evidence or factual research. The political damage has already been done here when the terrorists attacked Kingman City and we were completely unprepared and unaware of the plot—now is the time for the President to step forward and pursue an offensive, forward-leaning, aggressive program to stop future attacks. I realize it may take time and some convincing to get the congressional leadership on board…”

“ ‘Some convincing’? The leadership thinks we’d be nuts to try it, and there’s no way anyone will endorse it,” Collins interjected. “I’ve spoken informally and off the record about it, and there’s no way it will ever fly…”

“Can you possibly be any more negative and wishy-washy here, Collins?” Chamberlain asked angrily. “The President directed the staff to lay the groundwork for a declaration of war against terrorism. You’re not supposed to ask ‘pretty please’ and float trial balloons—you’re supposed to implement the President’s directives. This speech does nothing to advance the President’s agenda.”

Collins stepped forward and was about to take on Chamberlain face-to-face, but the President touched her arm to stop her. “So what are you suggesting, Robert?” he asked.

Chamberlain handed him the folder. “I’ve redrafted your speech to include my recommendations,” he said. “This speech should be a call to action, not a ‘Don’t worry about a thing’ lullaby. The speech directs the departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, and State to put out a call to all former employees and contractors to volunteer to assist in helping to ramp up operations, and directs all agencies to make retraining and recertifying these volunteers a top priority. We need at least a thirty percent across-the-board increase in manpower in the next six months to help in border security, security screening, background checks, record checks, surveillance, inspections, support services, and administration…”

“That’s five percent a month!” Collins exclaimed. “It can’t be done!”

“It can and it must, for the sake of our nation,” Chamberlain said. “If we don’t get volunteers, we should consider drafting citizens to do it—not drafting citizens to go in the military, but drafting them to serve their country to help in the war on terror. High school graduates and everyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty will be required to do at least one year of paid government work in a field of their choice, and will then be required to work at least four weeks per year until age sixty…”

“Where in the world is this idea coming from, Chamberlain?” Collins retorted.

“Israel has been doing a similar program for decades, and it is highly successful,” Chamberlain said. “The United States could be under siege like Israel if we don’t act.

“I’m proposing a straight volunteer program right now, but I also propose we ramp up the volunteer program so we can increase our manpower by one hundred percent within the next fifteen to twenty-four months,” Chamberlain went on. “I suggest we offer Americorps or G.I. Bill–like incentives for volunteers: credits for home loan programs, tuition rebates, discount Medicare cards, job training opportunities, tax deductions for volunteer expenses, even tax cuts if necessary.

“I also propose bringing home each and every Reserve Force soldier from overseas duty and putting them to work on domestic security tasks,” Chamberlain said. “The National Guard and Reserves were always meant to be there to help protect the American people on American soil, not helping the active-duty troops fight overseas. We should increase pay for the Reserve Forces and strengthen the laws that protect their civilian jobs while they’re away on Reserve duties, even if it means the government pays their salaries for the jobs that were lost.”

“This is insane, Mr. President!” Collins said as she read her copy of the draft. “None of this has been staffed. We won’t be able to address the most basic questions—how much this will cost, who will be accepted, who will be rejected, who will oversee the program, and a million other questions! Legal hasn’t even been alerted that you were going to recommend any of this. We’re not going to get the media and the American people all hot and bothered with this idea and then find it’s not legal or constitutional. You can’t expect the President to make a speech about this tonight without doing the staff work first!”

“Mr. President, I’ve already got my staff doing the basic legal research,” Chamberlain said. “They’ll have their results to me this afternoon in plenty of time to brief you before your speech to the American people at nine P.M. So far there’s nothing we can’t address. The union or civil service status of the volunteers and draftees is a prime concern, but that’s not a barricade. Vicki is overreacting, and as usual she’s erring on the side of extreme caution, which is precisely what we don’t need at this time. What we need is bold, decisive, determined action.”

The President looked over at Collins, who was silently reading the edited speech, shaking her head, a grim expression on her face. “Victoria?”

“I can’t even begin to list the holes in this proposal, Mr. President,” she responded. “Who will assume legal responsibility for the volunteers? How do we work this program into the departments’ budgets? How do we handle information and operational security issues…?”

“That’s all flak, Mr. President,” Chamberlain said. “It’s details. My staff hasn’t uncovered any major glitches in the idea so far. Once the department and congressional staffs jump on this I’m sure they’ll uncover problems, but I’m also sure there won’t be anything that can’t be solved. More important, sir, it shows you doing something positive and proactive. Extreme times call for extreme measures.”

The President finished reading the speech, thought about it for a few moments, then nodded. “Victoria, give this to Communications and have them polish it up and put it out to the staff. I want comments and changes forwarded by four P.M. this afternoon.”

“Do you want the press and Congress to get a whiff?”

“Yes,” the President replied immediately. “The more eyes looking at this proposal, the better. Might as well have as many folks as possible vet this idea—might save our staffs a lot of legwork.”

“Do you want this idea to come from the White House or the office of the national security adviser?” Collins asked. “Since you haven’t had time to think about it, it might be better to give credit for the proposal to Mr. Chamberlain at first.”

“His office and mine are the same,” the President said. “I’ll give credit but take responsibility for the proposal. It’s a good idea, Robert. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Chamberlain said.

“Try to give us more of a heads-up next time, but with this Kingman City crisis, everyone is on the run.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Collins shot Chamberlain an evil glare as she departed the Oval Office. The President read the edited speech over once more, then commented, “I see you scheduled yourself to view some kind of demonstration over at Andrews Air Force Base. What else are you working on, Robert?”

“A demonstration of that manned robotic exoskeleton technology that did that rescue out at Kingman City at Andrews Air Force Base this morning,” Chamberlain replied. “I’m going to propose that we build a unit of those things and put them to work hunting down terrorists.”

“Sounds good.”

“I’m also going to propose that we build a joint task force—the military and the FBI, working together, to hunt down terrorists,” Chamberlain went on. “I want this task force to have the mobility and lethality of a special-ops unit, the striking power of a Marine expeditionary unit, and the legal and investigative capability of the FBI; it should be able to operate worldwide.”

“You don’t believe in thinking small or forming a consensus with your fellow advisers, do you, Robert?” the President commented with a chuckle. “All right, you’re authorized to put together such a task force under the National Security Council’s authority and discretionary budget. Don’t have them do a thing without my express written authorization—they can form, organize, and train together, but they can’t do anything in the field yet. You’re in for an uphill battle on this volunteer program idea, and even more of a turf war over this joint civil-military task force idea. But if anyone can get these programs approved, it’s you.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Who are you going to propose to lead this joint task force?”

“My aide, Army Command Sergeant Major Raymond Jefferson.”

“Not an officer?”

“Jefferson is the best of the best in special-operations fieldwork, Mr. President,” Chamberlain said. “He’s led both Ranger and Delta Force teams in missions all around the world for almost twenty years. He’s tough, he’s got lots of special-ops experience, and he’s itching to get out of Washington and back into the real world.”

“Who will command?”

“I picked an intelligence agent from the FBI, and I thought of using the officer that developed that manned robot contraption as a cocommander. I’ll meet with both of them this morning at the demonstration.”

“Putting the FBI and the military together like this will be like mixing gasoline and air: Do it right and it produces horsepower; do it wrong, and it…”

“Creates a big explosion. I know, sir,” Chamberlain said. “I’ll make it work.”

“Keep me advised, Robert. And thanks for the hard work.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

Just before he reached the door, the President called out, “Robert?”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“What is it with you and Victoria?” he asked. “You know she doesn’t like being called ‘Vicki’ but you do it anyway, and it just creates tension. You two seem to be butting heads constantly, and I’m starting to feel more like a referee than the chief executive. What’s up with that?”

“I don’t like it when folks slam ideas before they’ve had a chance to study them, that’s all, sir—especially my ideas,” Chamberlain replied. “Victoria Collins is a political animal. She’s not interested in real solutions, just political expediency.”

“Maybe she’s just giving advice. That’s what she gets paid for.”

“She gets paid to run the White House staff,” Chamberlain said. “She acts as an adviser, yes, but her primary job is to get things done. When I get a directive from the President of the United States, it’s an order, not a suggestion. You directed the White House staff to lay the groundwork for you to ask for a congressional declaration of war on terrorism. It didn’t mean list all the ways it can’t or shouldn’t be done, but to do it.”

“Is that the way you did things at TransGlobal Energy, Robert?”

“Actually, sir, that’s what I learned at TGE—unfortunately, I learned it too late,” Chamberlain admitted. “I learned there are those who lead, those who follow, and those who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. I thought Harold Chester Kingman was a leader, and I was happy and proud to be his lieutenant. I found out soon enough that he is a morally bankrupt, totally corrupt, completely uncaring, and utterly emotionless bag of shit. I became his fall guy and was disgraced simply because I made the mistake of following him when I should have been voicing my opinions and standing up for what I believed to be right.”

“You’re referring to the Russian oil deal?”

“Yes, sir. Kingman had an opportunity to unite TGE with one of the world’s largest oil producers and build an alliance that would span half the globe. I believe he could have been instrumental in uniting Russia and the U.S. politically and economically too, similar to the alliance between the U.S. and Japan, for which we would have been recognized for decades. Instead, he turned the deal upside down. He fired the entire Russian board and top officers of the company, then dared to threaten the Russian government by withholding their own oil and natural gas if they didn’t cooperate with the takeover. When I stepped out of line and argued against the move, I was fired as well.”

“That was years ago. You still sound upset.”

“It was a harsh lesson, sir,” Chamberlain said stonily. “Harold Kingman just doesn’t fire someone—he destroys them, just to make sure they don’t rise up against him some time in the future. I lost millions in stock options. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight off corruption, embezzlement, fraud, and conspiracy charges that were all frivolous and unproven, and now I’m having to pay thousands more to keep my countersuits alive against TGE’s constant delays, countersuits, and slanderous attacks in the media. In the meantime, my wife left me—amid allegations of adultery, all of which were not true and completely baseless—my kids disowned me, and I became a pariah in the eyes of every corporation in the world.”

“I know the story, Robert—but what does it have to do with Victoria Collins?”

Chamberlain paused, then averted his eyes before replying: “Maybe…maybe I see some of the ‘play it safe’ attitude that I had at TGE in her sometimes, the attitude that ruined my corporate career. Maybe I’m still angry at myself for my indecisiveness and lack of courage, and I take it out on others that I perceive as being the same.”

“You have nothing to prove here, Robert,” the President said, getting to his feet, walking around the desk, and putting a hand on his National Security Adviser’s shoulder. “You have been a tough, courageous, no-nonsense, and dedicated adviser and confidant to me and this administration since the first day you set foot in the White House. TransGlobal Energy’s and the corporate world’s loss is my gain.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. That means a lot.”

The President stepped back and seated himself at his desk again, signaling the end of the brotherly role and the resumption of the chief executive role. “You have nothing to prove, Robert—which means take the damned chip off your shoulder and start being a member of the team rather than the ideological taskmaster,” he said sternly. “You are an important man in my personal and professional life, but you are just one of many important persons around here. Start thinking of ways to build bridges instead of walls; stop torpedoing the other staff members in this office. I expect you to share your ideas with the others before you present them to me and get as much of the conflicts ironed out so we don’t waste a lot of time in bickering and confusion when you walk in here looking for a decision. Are we clear on this?”

“Yes, sir,” Chamberlain responded. The President looked down at the edited speech, signaling an end to their conversation. “Thank you, Mr. President,” Chamberlain muttered, and walked out.

I serve at the pleasure of the President, Chamberlain reminded himself as he headed back to his office to get ready for the visit to Andrews Air Force Base—and right now, the President wasn’t too pleased with him.

Facility H-18, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland

A short time later

“With all due respect to the Brazilians, I think they should get their heads out of their asses and try a little harder,” Special Agent Kelsey D. DeLaine said into her secure cell phone. She kept an eye on the partially open warehouse door for any sign of activity, but so far nothing was happening. Inside the empty building there were only a few Air Force Security Forces guards and one lone guy in camouflage battle dress uniform standing near a high-tech-looking Humvee. His hair was a little long, he was skinny and white-skinned, and he had horn-rimmed glasses strapped to his head with a black elastic band. If he was a military guy, he was definitely the geekiest-looking one she had ever seen. “There’s an attack on a TransGlobal facility in Brazil on the same day, almost the same hour, as the attack in Houston, and no one sees a connection?”

“Kel, there have been a total of nineteen attacks against TransGlobal or affiliated companies in South America in the past year,” her associate, Special Agent Ramiro “Rudy” Cortez, Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on the other end of the connection. “All of them involved small dams and power-generating plants, and all used only homemade explosives. Strictly small-time. I’m not sure there’s a connection.”

“Rudy, we can’t start to piece it together until we get more information from our ‘friends’ in the Policia Militar do Estado, but they seem to be dragging their feet on our requests,” DeLaine said impatiently. She had long brown hair, but it was put up now off her collar, which irritated and aggravated her to no end—she hated the feel of cold air on the back of her neck. Her black Reebok power-walking shoes were in her bureau car outside, and after standing in heels for the past twenty minutes she wished she’d brought them along. She shifted the Glock 29 pistol on her right hip for the umpteenth time, trying to find a comfortable position for the compact weapon, and wished that the bureau would reinstate the option for agents to carry their weapon in a purse in nonhostile environments.

“They’re doing the best they can, Kel,” Cortez said. “Their country is as big as ours but nowhere near as connected. We only made the request yesterday. My, we’re cranky this morning, aren’t we?”

“The eight A.M. meeting hasn’t happened yet, the place is empty, no one but some grungy-looking army gopher is here, and my feet are killing me. What do we know about this Brazilian group, GAMMA?”

“Brazilian environmental and human rights activist organization. Targets multinational petroleum and energy-producing corporations in general but appears to be going after TransGlobal Energy Corporation assets more and more in particular.”

“I want to know every detail possible about GAMMA,” Kelsey said. “If the PME won’t give the information to the FBI office in Rio de Janeiro, we should send a request to the CIA Americas desk for support. And we should start pulling data on Brazilian nuclear material and weapons research programs. Brazil could be a source for bomb-making materials, if not the actual weapons themselves.”

“As long as you’re asking for the impossible, why don’t you get me a sleepover with Jennifer Lopez?” Cortez quipped. “Kel, we’ve got every agent in our office pulling sixteen-hour days since the Houston attack. Everyone is concentrating on how a backpack nuke got into the U.S. undetected. No one is looking at Brazilian ecoterrorist groups yet—we’re looking at the more credible perps, like al Qaeda, missing Russian tactical nuclear weapons, the Chinese…”

“Then get a clerk or records officer to check—it’s all computer work,” Kelsey said. “They can pass the info to you and I’ll brief the chief and get the extra manpower if we need it. But we’re just doing surveillance—it’s not fieldwork, not yet.”

“Kelsey, you’ve already pressed every clerk, records person, secretary, janitor, and doorman into doing research for us,” her partner said. “You’ve even gotten clerks in other agencies doing work for us, which I’m sure is a breach of security. At the very least you’re going to owe a lot of lunches.”

“Ramiro…”

“Uh oh, the ethnic first name—discussion must be over,” Rudy said. “Okay, I’ll get on it. Any idea what your meeting is about, and why they scheduled it for an empty building at Andrews?”

“This is not just a ‘building,’ Rudy—the Redskins could play here if they laid down some artificial turf and put up goalposts,” Kelsey said. “I have no idea. I’m hoping they’re going to fly in a witness that’ll break the Houston bombing wide open for us, but I’m not that lucky.”

“Probably has to do with that memo you sent to the director a few months back,” Cortez surmised. “Didn’t you mention something about nuclear weapons then?”

“I talked about a memo I wrote based on reports from our London and Warsaw offices about Russian tactical battlefield nuclear warheads being converted to ‘backpack’ weapons,” Kelsey said. “It was a collection of reports from our bureaus and from European sources spanning three years and three continents, and I had no concrete conclusions—I thought my office should start an analysis and try to come up with some definite links. I thought the report got circular-filed.”

“Obviously after Houston, folks noticed.”

Just then she noticed the warehouse door opening, and several security officers taking positions inside and out. “I should find out soon—someone’s arriving. Talk to you later.”

“Break a leg.”

Kelsey closed her phone, then straightened her shoulders as three dark stretch limousines approached. The warehouse doors closed, with guards both inside and out. The limos pulled over to Kelsey…and she was at first surprised, then shocked, at the figures that stepped out of those cars: the director of the FBI, JeffreyF. Lemke, from the first; Secretary of Homeland Security, Donna Calhoun, from the second; and the President’s National Security Adviser, Robert Chamberlain, from the third.

“Kelsey, good to see you again,” Director Lemke said, holding out his hand. She shook hands. Although she worked at FBI headquarters in Washington, she’d attended just a few meetings with the director and maybe said six words to him in two and a half years. Jeffrey Lemke was a former FBI agent turned federal prosecutor and politician, first as a state attorney general and then as a two-term congressman from Oklahoma before being appointed FBI director. Kelsey liked him and thought he was an effective director, although he looked and spoke more like a politician than an FBI agent—which was probably a good thing.

Lemke turned and motioned beside him. “Secretary Calhoun, I’d like to introduce Special Agent Kelsey DeLaine, deputy director of our intelligence office in Washington and one of our best analysts. Agent DeLaine, Secretary of Homeland Security Calhoun.”

“Nice to see you again, Madam Secretary,” Kelsey said. “We met about two months ago when I briefed you and your staff on my report on backpack nuclear devices.” The pain on Donna Calhoun’s face, which Kelsey remembered seeing in a press conference on TV just last night and was obviously still with her, deepened to a look of stony agony. Kelsey meant her remark to make the secretary feel more comfortable with her, but she saw that it only made her sadder. Calhoun nodded in greeting but said nothing and stepped away to speak with Chamberlain.

“Sorry about that, sir. I wasn’t thinking. I remember she lost some family in Houston.”

“Don’t try to make polite chitchat here, DeLaine,” Lemke said pointedly. “This is not a damned cocktail party.”

“Yes, sir.” She was not accustomed to being admonished like that, even by the director, especially after recognizing her gaff and apologizing for it, but she tried not to let her indignation show. “Can you tell me what is going on?”

“We’ll all find out together,” the FBI director responded woodenly. The military officers remained apart from the civilians, talking between themselves at first and then with Chamberlain as he approached.

Kelsey found it odd that the lone guy by the Humvee had stayed by himself as all this brass arrived, so when curiosity finally overcame her, she excused herself from Lemke and stepped over to him. The guy didn’t look like a GI at all: his hair was rumpled and a bit longer than the other military guys in the hangar wore theirs; his boots looked as if they hadn’t been polished in eons; and he had a slight stubble as if he hadn’t shaved in a couple days. He was wearing crisp, new-looking military fatigues but there was no rank or insignia on them—they were obviously borrowed or just recently purchased. A very attractive dark-haired woman in a green olive drab T-shirt and black fatigue trousers was sitting behind the wheel with a headset on—she looked more military than the guy did, but she didn’t seem military. Neither of them displayed any ID. “Excuse me,” she said. “I saw you over here all by yourself and thought I’d introduce myself. I’m Kelsey…”

“Special Agent Kelsey DeLaine, deputy director of intelligence, FBI, Washington,” the officer said. “I’m Major Jason Richter, ITB, Army Research Lab, Fort Polk, Louisiana.”

“You’re in the army?” Kelsey asked, glancing up at his unkempt hair.

“We’ve had a long couple of days,” Richter said a little sheepishly. “This is Dr. Ariadna Vega, assistant director.”

“ITB?”

“Infantry Transformation BattleLab. We try to think of ways to make infantry soldiers more lethal.”

“Sounds interesting—and a little scary.” She extended a hand, and he shook it. He seemed a little nervous—his hand was cold and clammy, and there was a slight sheen of perspiration on his upper lip. His handshake matched his appearance—he seemed more like a computer nerd than an army officer. But in the intelligence field she learned that very often appearances were deceiving. He would look a lot cuter, she decided, if he weren’t wearing those geeky glasses. She shook hands with Vega as well. “Nice to meet you. How do you know who I am?”

“Because we’re monitoring all conversations taking place inside this building and all movement within a mile,” he replied.

“You are? How are you doing that?”

“Surveillance units, both inside and outside.”

Kelsey motioned to the Air Force guards. “You mean those guys?”

“No. Unmanned probes.” He pointed toward the roof. “I don’t think you can see it, but there’s a device on the roof right about there that looks like a giant cockroach, about the size of a serving tray. It can pick up, record, jam, analyze, and transmit voice, video, electromagnetic signals, and data for two square kilometers. It can crawl around walls and ceilings, and deactivates itself if it thinks it’s being scanned.”

This guy was a little too cocky and calm for her liking. He was not wearing a sidearm, but his hands were behind his back where she couldn’t see them. She fished out an ID badge that she had been given after checking in at base security. “Do you have one of these, Major, Doctor?” she asked, her voice a little sterner. “Can I see it?”

Richter smiled. “No, I don’t,” the guy said. His smile sent a warning chill up and down her spine. “I didn’t arrive via the front gate.”

“Then let me see some ID, both of you,” she ordered in a loud voice.

“Agent DeLaine…?” Director Lemke said behind her.

“I don’t have any ID to show you, Kelsey,” Richter said. “We’re here to dazzle the brass over there.”

Now she was thankful that she didn’t have her gun in her purse. Kelsey quickly drew her Glock from her holster and held it at her side where it was clearly visible but not pointed at him. “Then let me see your hands, above your head, both of you, now!” she ordered.

Richter’s eyes lit up in surprise. “Oh, goody,” the army officer said with a quirky smile as he slowly raised his hands. They were empty. “We get to start the demonstration early.”

“What did you say?” She watched as the army officer reached over and touched some buttons on his wristwatch, which she could now see was a very large device, more like a small computer keypad. “Don’t touch that! Keep your hands up!”

“What’s going on here?” the National Security Adviser was demanding. “Put that pistol down…!”

At that moment Kelsey noticed a blur of motion. Someone, a woman—Secretary Calhoun, Kelsey realized—screamed. Kelsey glanced to her right…just in time to see a large robot-looking thing running at her as fast as a track and field sprinter. She dropped to her left knee and just had time to aim her pistol at the running machine.

“CID One, stop,” Richter spoke in a quiet voice—not as a warning but as a gentle command. The machine stopped instantly—Kelsey couldn’t believe a thing that big moving so fast could stop so quickly. “Please don’t shoot it, Agent DeLaine,” he added. “It won’t like it very much.”

Kelsey froze but kept her pistol aimed in the center of the machine’s torso. The machine had both its arms upraised, mechanical fingers extended like claws—and mounted on its right shoulder, Kelsey was staring into the muzzle of the biggest machine gun she had ever seen, not ten feet away from her face. “I believe I have the drop on you,” Richter added with a smile.

“I see you’ve decided to start the demonstration on your own, Major Richter,” Robert Chamberlain said. “Agent DeLaine, you can put your weapon away. Major Richter’s machine is part of the reason we’re here this morning.”

“Sorry, sir,” Kelsey said a little sheepishly, rising to her feet and holstering her pistol. “I asked for this man’s ID, and he said he didn’t have any.”

“Obviously you don’t watch much television, Agent DeLaine—you’re probably the only person in the world who’s never heard of Major Jason Richter and his robot here and what they did at Kingman City yesterday,” Chamberlain said. He nodded toward Jason and Kelsey. “Major Jason Richter is deputy director of the Army Research Lab’s Infantry Transformation BattleLab, the creator of the Cybernetic Infantry Device, or CID, unit you see before you. Major Richter, this is FBI Special Agent Kelsey DeLaine, deputy chief of intelligence in Washington.” To Calhoun and Lemke, Chamberlain said, “I propose that these two individuals together with this hardware, among other innovations, form the backbone of America’s war on terror.”

Jason’s eyes bugged out in surprise, and he looked at DeLaine, who immediately looked at him with the same expression. Neither of them knew what to expect after that announcement, but what they got…was bedlam.

“You mean, you propose to use that thing to hunt down terrorists?” Secretary of Homeland Security Calhoun retorted. “You’re joking, aren’t you, Chamberlain?”

“I’ve never been more serious—and neither has the President,” Chamberlain said. “It will be the first federal law-enforcement task force created to specifically detect, identify, pursue, and destroy terrorists around the world. I intend it to be an ultra-rapid response force that will be primarily investigative in nature but equipped to handle a wide array of threats, including military adversaries.”

“You can’t do that, Mr. Chamberlain—it’s prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act,” Homeland Security Secretary Calhoun pointed out. “We’ve stretched the boundaries of that law for years, but having a military unit actively and purposefully involved in law-enforcement actions is against the law.”

“First of all, Madam Secretary, CID doesn’t belong to a military unit—it’s just an experimental design,” Chamberlain pointed out. “Second, CID will be used in a support role, which is permitted under the law. I’ve verified this with the White House counsel. The President will issue a classified executive order secretly implementing this new FBI task force, code-named TALON, reporting directly to the White House and funded by National Security Council discretionary funds…”

“Meaning, run by you,” Jeffrey Lemke interjected skeptically.

“The President will be responsible for all of TALON’s activities and will be briefed on a daily basis of its operations and status.”

“But you will be managing it for the President, right?”

“I will propose that the operational unit be supervised by Command Sergeant Major Ray Jefferson, a veteran special-ops leader and the noncommissioned officer in charge of operations for the National Security Council,” Chamberlain went on, motioning toward the soldier standing behind him at parade rest. Like Richter, Jefferson was wearing a green camouflage battle dress uniform, but with a very large sidearm. “They will set up operations at a secret location and begin organizing, planning, and training together.

“But we will go farther than this, Director Lemke, Secretary Calhoun,” Chamberlain went on. “The President proposes to use the current Threat Level Red condition to ask Congress to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. He will then reveal the existence of Task Force TALON and request full funding, provided by Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice Department allocations.”

“But…but what about this thing?” Calhoun asked. “Where does this thing come in?”

“Madam Secretary, technology like CID represent the evolution of the U.S. infantry and possibly law enforcement. This is the perfect opportunity to put this new weapon system into action.” He turned to Richter. “Mount up, Major, and let’s give them a demonstration. Tell us what we’re seeing.”

“Yes, sir.” Jason stepped forward and stood before the machine. “Ladies and gentlemen, CID is more than a robot and more than an exoskeleton—it is designed to be a fighting unit all by itself. It can replace an entire four-man infantry or special-operations squad, except it has capabilities that are far superior to a normal rifle, machine gun, or rocket squad. It has the firepower of an infantry squad but is as fast and as self-protective as a Humvee, has the communications-and intelligence-gathering capability of a Stryker light armored reconnaissance unit, and the rapid deployment capability of a Marine Corps special-operations platoon.

“The Cybernetic Infantry Device is composed of a lightweight composite framework, many times stronger than steel but only a fraction of the weight, covered in impact-resistant composite armor,” Jason went on. “It is powered by several different sources: a rechargeable hydrogen fuel cell, lithium-ion batteries, and solar power. Locomotion is provided by very small hydraulic systems that support the structure, coupled with a computer-based haptic interface that precisely translates human muscle and limb movement into exoskeleton movement, even against forces that would make a human muscle fail. This CID unit has the strength of ten men, and that strength can be enhanced even more with improvements we’re making in its microhydraulic systems. Other CID systems provide global communications, satellite datalink, multi-spectral sensors, and precision-weapon fire control.

“As you can see, this CID has one weapon already installed, a twenty-millimeter cannon. CID One, about-face.” The machine smoothly and quietly turned around. “The weapons are modular, contained in quick-don, reloadable backpacks that allows weapons to be employed without having to lift or point them with the arms and hands or aim them with the eyes. We have developed other modules including grenade, rocket, unmanned aerial vehicle, missile launchers, and even long-range reconnaissance and communications relay.”

Jason motioned to the side of the warehouse, and a Humvee drove up. “CID One, stow the backpack,” Jason spoke. The machine stepped over to the left side of the Humvee, turned around, and backed into a cutout on the side of the vehicle. Seconds later, the cannon folded itself inside the backpack, and the backpack detached itself from the machine and disappeared inside the vehicle. “Inside the special Humvee, the module is automatically tested, serviced, and reloaded in about five minutes, while the CID can attach another module. The Humvee is designed to support two CID units and can carry four modules with one reload apiece along with the two CID troopers, a driver, and a support technician.

“Here’s the best part: CID One, retire.” At that command, the machine started to fold itself. Seconds later, it had compressed into a box-shaped object that resembled a large old-fashioned steamer trunk, complete with handles. Jason and Ari Vega squatted down and picked the object up. “Weighs about eighty to ninety pounds—easily transportable by two persons.”

“So, this thing does…what?” Lemke asked. “Follows a couple special-ops guys around? Runs beside the soldiers? Sounds pretty ridiculous to me.”

“You called it an ‘exoskeleton,’ ” DeLaine asked. “Is there someone inside?”

“I’m sorry—I got a little ahead of myself,” Jason said. “CID One, activate.” The machine unfolded itself in less time than it took to fold. “CID doesn’t follow you around, sir—the pilot wears it. CID, pilot up.” At that command, an access door opened up in back of the machine. Using the backs of the legs, Jason climbed up and slid inside the machine, and the door closed behind him. A few seconds later, the machine came alive.

It was almost comical to watch: unlike before, when the machine moved in a characteristic robotlike gait, the machine now moved exactly like a human—smoothly, fluidly, almost randomly. Its arms, fingers, head, neck, shoulders, hips, and legs articulated as if they was real. Every unconscious gesture, quirk, reflex, and adjustment that a normal human made could be seen, except it was being accomplished not by a human being but by a three-meter-tall machine. They could not see his face—his head was completely covered in armor, his eyes with an electro-optical visor; the machine’s ears were dielectric sensor panels—but it almost seemed as if they could feel him looking at their stunned reactions just by observing his body language—yes, they could all notice body language in this amazing machine.

“As you can see, CID’s haptic interface, powered by fast computers, fly-by-wire controls, and even faster microhydraulic actuators, gives the pilot a very easy, free range of movement,” he said, his voice amplified via a hidden speaker. Its right foot lifted up, and the machine did a perfect spin on its “toes.” He then started to hop, skip, and jump around the warehouse, resembling some sort of hulking child. The jumps got longer and higher, eventually reaching several meters, but he landed with virtually no noise. After the jumps, Jason started running around the hangar—and within moments, his speed was breathtaking, circling the entire football-field-size building in about twenty seconds.

Jason then jumped back over to the Humvee. Ari threw him three tennis balls, and Jason began to juggle them. “That concludes my demonstration,” he said as he juggled. “Any questions?”

There was no reaction to the amazing showing for several long moments. Finally, Kelsey asked, “How…how long can your power last, Major?”

“Depends on the activity,” Jason replied. Ari retrieved a bowling ball from the Humvee and threw it at Jason, and he started juggling it along with the tennis balls. “Full combat operations with a couple backpacks and reloads, covering an AOR of twenty square miles: five to six hours. A reconnaissance mission or light armed patrol: perhaps two days. The fuel cells can be changed in a few seconds; the battery lasts between fifteen and sixty minutes for emergency power; and the solar panels can charge the batteries in about two hours.”

“Can you please stop that, Major?” Donna Calhoun asked perturbedly. Jason caught the three tennis balls in one hand and the bowling ball in another. Calhoun shook her head. It was very hard to take this machine seriously—or maybe it wasn’t the machine, but the man inside it, that she couldn’t stand. “Mr. Chamberlain, it’s very impressive, but if you expect Homeland Security support for this project, you have to give us more time to evaluate this system and design performance and operational guidelines for it. You can’t just take something like this out of the lab and put it in the field without tests, evaluations, measurements, and some planning about how it can be used. We have no idea what it’s capable of.”

Jason handed the tennis balls to Ari, as casually as a grade school kid passing a note to a buddy—and then he took the bowling ball between his two hands and, with a loud “POP!” crushed it into black powder, right before their eyes.

All of the observers jumped in complete surprise. “Goddamn it, Major, as you were!” Sergeant Major Jefferson snapped in a voice that made even the civilians jump. Jason immediately dropped the powderized bowling ball and assumed parade rest—Kelsey practically had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing at the sight of this horrific yet impressive machine standing before them like a Marine guard at the White House. “Take that thing off…I mean, shut that thing off…I mean, get out of that damned thing, Major!” The machine assumed its special stance, with its left leg extended backward and both knees bent; the access hatch flipped open, and Jason climbed out. His hair and uniform were slightly rumpled, but he looked as he did when he first climbed inside. He stood at parade rest beside the machine.

“This is all very impressive, Mr. Chamberlain, but I’m not going to sign off on this thing without some study,” Lemke went on, impatiently looking at his watch, obviously ready to depart.

“I’m afraid I agree with Jeffrey,” Donna Calhoun said. “The Department of Homeland Security can’t even begin to start designing doctrine and training with the CID units until we can study how it works, how it’s maintained, what its flaws and limitations are…”

“You don’t understand, Madam Secretary,” Chamberlain said with a tone of firm exasperation in his voice. “This project is going forward. Sergeant Major Jefferson prepared an operations plan, including the initial TO&E, and the President signed it.” He withdrew envelopes from his jacket pocket and handed one to each of them. “Full authorization from the President for a pilot program, ninety days. We are requesting a written report within the next three days on the budgetary, equipment, and personnel support you can provide TALON, and all of the listed support items delivered to the base within fifteen days.”

“What?” Lemke exclaimed. He snatched an envelope from Chamberlain’s hand, opened it, and quickly read. “You want a hundred personnel, an airbase, computers, satellite Earth stations, aircraft…all in fifteen days? Mr. Chamberlain, I can’t even guarantee I can staff this request within fifteen days, let alone deliver all this stuff…”

“Then you’ll personally explain to the President why you can’t comply,” Chamberlain said. “Director, I know you’ve done a lot more in a lot less time. I’m sorry you weren’t given more time to provide your input…”

“I wasn’t given any time!”

“…but Kingman City has changed everything. We want to do everything we can to prevent another incident like this, and the way we’re going to do it is form a task force that can deploy at a moment’s notice and hit the enemy hard.”

“We have that already, Robert—it’s called U.S. Special Operations,” Calhoun said. “It’s called the U.S. Marines. You don’t need to start all over again.”

“I agree,” Lemke said. “It sounds to me as if you need to bring the FBI in on this.”

“It’s been considered and rejected because of our legal limitations,” Chamberlain said. “I suggested, and the President concurred, that to carry out these operations with the current legal and political limitations would not be efficient or effective. When I was made aware of the CID weapon system and the other innovations being developed by the Army Research Lab, immediately after the Houston attack, I decided that making TALON a separate unit instead of part of the FBI was a better way to proceed. Again, the President concurred.”

“Mr. Chamberlain, it’s a little unusual for the President’s National Security Adviser to be setting up any kind of direct action military unit,” Donna Calhoun said, “let alone one that combines direct action military hardware like this with a federal law-enforcement agency like the FBI. We already have such paramilitary organizations in place, like the Coast Guard, Customs Service, and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which frankly work very well with the FBI. It seems like you’re duplicating your efforts.”

FBI Director Jeffrey Lemke nodded in agreement. “After Kingman City, Robert, we’re stretched to the breaking point,” he added. “We can’t afford any manpower to hand over to this task force of yours, especially not my deputy for intelligence.” Lemke motioned to Kelsey DeLaine. “Kelsey is one of my best and most trusted analysts.”

Lemke nodded to Richter, then let his eyes roam over his unkempt hair and unshaven face with a disapproving expression. “The major here…well, he seems like a fine young man, but how well do you really know him? How long have you known him? Have you checked out his background? Is that his real name? Who are his parents, his relatives?” He glanced at Special Agent DeLaine and saw her looking at him suspiciously. “Did he really graduate from Georgia Tech? Is he really twenty-nine years old? Did you even know how old he was? Do you…?”

“Stop, stop—I get the picture,” Chamberlain said, holding up his hand. He stood silent for a few moments, collecting his thoughts; then: “No…no, I’m determined to see this through. I don’t care if this is not the way it’s usually done; I don’t care if the military doesn’t like the way I’m doing it. It’s got to be done. It’s been years since 9/11, and I don’t think enough has been accomplished—and the attack on Kingman City proves it. It’s time to get tough on terrorists before they attack and destroy Washington, not just an isolated oil terminal outside Houston or a couple skyscrapers in New York City.”

It was obvious from their expressions that Calhoun and Lemke did not agree or share any of Chamberlain’s excitement. But for Jason Richter, this seemed like an important moment. The war on terrorism, it seemed, was preparing to enter a newer, deadlier phase—right here in the United States. And he was going to be part of it!

“I’m asking for your full support,” Chamberlain said earnestly. “The President will back you up all the way. I appreciate your time and attention, and I’ll give you any information and constant reports on our progress. Thank you for being here.”

Jeffrey Lemke read over the letter, even running his fingers over the President’s signature to see if it was real. He then looked at Jason and the CID unit and nodded. “The bureau will give you all the help we can, Robert,” he said, “but this is definitely a difficult time to be standing up a unit like this. We’re still reeling from the attack on Kingman City—I need all my people to hunt down those responsible.”

“And now you have a new interdiction and direct-action unit to help you,” Chamberlain said. “But it’s got to be done, and I’m determined to do it—in fact, I’ll gladly sacrifice whatever political future I have to get it done.” He extended his hand to Lemke and affixed a sincere, direct gaze. “I’m counting on your support, Director.”

Lemke seemed skeptical as he shook Chamberlain’s hand. He looked at Kelsey. “Cooperate for now, Agent DeLaine,” he said. “Keep in contact with me. I want a daily report.”

“That won’t be possible, Director,” Chamberlain said. “TALON needs to operate on a strictly classified basis. No outside communication unless through me.”

“Then I order Special Agent DeLaine to refuse to cooperate at all with this operation,” Lemke said. “The National Security Council will not be allowed to use Bureau assets or data without full disclosure and reporting. No argument.”

Chamberlain looked at Lemke as if he was going to try to pull rank on him, but instead he nodded. “Done. Full disclosure. I’d like it directly between Agent DeLaine and your office.”

“My staff will arrange the proper report format and…”

“Your office only, Director,” Chamberlain said. “This is not for your staff. This is disclosure, Jeffrey, not approval or consultation. You can go up to the Justice Department with any concerns, but not to your staff.”

“Mr. Chamberlain, I guarantee I will be going to the Justice Department with this,” Lemke said sternly. But he nodded. “Fine. Kelsey, my direct line only, okay? I’ll give you the number.”

“Yes, sir.”

Donna Calhoun shook Chamberlain’s hand warmly, then gave him a hug. “I’m proud of you, Robert,” she said as they embraced. “God knows the shades of Kingman City are counting on you. This is a difficult thing you’re attempting. Thank you for your courage.”

“I won’t let you down, Madam Secretary, I promise,” Chamberlain told her softly. “I will avenge your loss.” He escorted her and Lemke to their waiting limousines and watched as they drove off.

After the second limo departed, Chamberlain turned toward Richter, Jefferson, and DeLaine; he hung his head, and actually seemed to look emotionally weary. He looked up, straightened his shoulders, took a deep breath…and then clapped his hands enthusiastically. “Well,” he said in a loud, energetic voice, “now that the bullshit is over, let’s get to work.”

Richter’s mouth dropped open in surprise; Chamberlain noticed it. “You don’t think I really give a shit about Calhoun’s dead sister and brother-in-law in Kingman City, do you, Major?” he asked incredulously. “You deal with these bureaucrats and politicians in whatever terms they understand and respond to. Calhoun is this sweet, sensitive liberal ex-U.S. federal prosecutor from Houston who couldn’t hurt a flea. Her wealthy real estate developer husband gave ten million dollars to the party and bought his wife a Cabinet position so he could continue screwing his friends’ wives in peace.

“The wild card in the deck is Jeffrey Lemke,” Chamberlain went on, turning back to the others. “He knew an awful lot about you, Major, and that is troubling.”

“Why, sir?”

“He got wind of this meeting and found out who the principals were,” Chamberlain replied. “That took initiative, curiosity, and attention to detail.”

“And you don’t approve of those traits in an FBI director, sir?” DeLaine asked sarcastically.

Chamberlain turned to the FBI agent and affixed her with a crocodile smile. “He undoubtedly got the information from you, Agent DeLaine, or somebody close to you in your office,” he said. “Director Lemke is indeed a capable young man, willing to spy on his own staff to get answers. That could become a liability.” He stepped closer to DeLaine, searching her eyes for any sign of weakness or sorrow for Lemke’s fate—and not finding any. He smiled at that realization. “It doesn’t matter. Within a week, all of you will be at your new base, setting up your new unit.” He kept his gaze fixed on Kelsey DeLaine’s green eyes. “You and the lovely Special Agent DeLaine are going to be the cocommanders of Task Force TALON, Major Richter. You are going to employ CID and any other high-tech gizmos you can devise to hunt down the perpetrators of the attack on Kingman City and any other terrorists around the world that threaten America.”

He turned to Sergeant Major Jefferson. “The sergeant major has already procured a base of operations for you in New Mexico. The commanding general at Fort Polk has been advised to give you all the manpower and support you need. I want you set up as soon as possible. You will use all your skills, expertise, and training, plus an extra helping of guts and audacity, to hunt down the terrorists that attacked Kingman City and bring them to justice—or destroy them. Either works for me.

“Now I know that this is not the typical chain of command, being organized and run by an NCO, but Command Sergeant Major Jefferson is the most experienced person I know to train and organize this task force,” Chamberlain went on. “I warn you not to get in his way—I’ve seen the man eat two-star generals for breakfast. You will treat him as you would myself at all times, is that clear?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Sergeant Major Jefferson.”

“Sir!”

“Take charge of Task Force TALON immediately.”

“Yes, sir.” Chamberlain walked away to his limousine without saying another word to anyone, leaving Jason and Kelsey alone with Jefferson and the CID unit. “Agent DeLaine, Major Richter, Dr. Vega, listen up,” he began. “Time is critical now. Our objective is to organize and set up a base of operations to train and support TALON’s weapon systems, collect and analyze intelligence data, and begin to conduct antiterrorist operations. Within three days we need to be in place, and within ten days we need to be set up and operating.

“I have already sent a forward field deployment team to our base of operations to help get set up,” Jefferson went on. “In fact, they have been working since yesterday. They’re not familiar with FBI procedures or the CID technology, so you need to bring them up to speed as soon as possible. That means getting your supplies out to New Mexico right away.” He handed them both cellular telephones. “Speed-dial zero-zero-one for me, ask, and I’ll get it for you. You already have transports and men to help you move. Agent DeLaine, a cargo aircraft will be here at Andrews ready to take you and your gear tomorrow. Major, the plane will arrive at Alexandria ready to take your gear the day after. Be on it. Questions?”

“What ‘gear’ do we take, Sergeant?” Jason asked.

Jefferson’s eyes widened in anger, and he stepped up to Jason and stood nose to nose with him. They were of just about equal height, but Jefferson’s sheer physical presence suddenly made Jason feel very small. “Major Richter, sir,” he said between clenched teeth, “I realize you are an officer, but it appears it is necessary for me to teach you something you should already know. I am not a sergeant, I am a sergeant major. That is something recruits learn within days of starting basic training. I hope it doesn’t take you as long to learn it.” He glared once more at Richter, then went on to all of them: “Bring everything remotely connected to CID or to any of the other devices you’ve set up in this warehouse,” he said. “You can take your whole lab if it’ll fit in a C-130 Hercules. Our priority will be deploying and utilizing the CID units in the field in the quickest amount of time. I understand you have two prototypes—bring both of them. Bring as many parts and partial prototypes as you can as well.”

“How do we know who or what to bring?” Kelsey asked.

“Bring everything you can get packed and ready in two days—we’ll sort it out when we get to Clovis,” Jefferson said. “The critical stuff needs to go on the plane; other things can be shipped by truck if necessary.”

“Clovis?”

“New Mexico. Cannon Air Force Base. Your new home for a while.” He detected that they were trying to think of anything they needed to ask, and the tall Marine was determined not to give them the opportunity. “That’ll be all, folks. Be at Cannon in three days, or I will come back and make life exceedingly unpleasant for you.”

He then looked directly at Jason and, addressing them all, “One more thing: in my unit, you will conform to all military discipline, dress, and appearance standards—clean shaven, clean uniform, and most important, you will conduct yourself in a professional military manner at all times, and that means inside your toy there as well as outside of it. We are not in your world now, sir—you’re in mine. Questions?”

“Just a comment, Sergeant Major.”

“What is it?”

“It would’ve been helpful if I was briefed on what you intended to do here, Sergeant Major,” Jason said. “If I had known that you were thinking about using the CID system to form an operational unit…”

“Major, I report to the National Security Adviser, and he reports only to the President of the United States and Congress, not to you,” Jefferson said. “He doesn’t need to ask you ‘pretty please’ before he decides to do something. He confers with the President, gets the go-ahead, and acts. That’s his job. I expect you to shut up and do yours, sir. Clear?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“That’s Sergeant Major, sir—don’t make me remind you again. Anything else for me, sir?”

“No, Sergeant Major.”

“Then may I strongly suggest you get a damned haircut and don’t let me see you in a dirty uniform again, sir. Now move out.”

Sergeant Major Jefferson departed immediately, leaving Jason, Ari, and Kelsey together alone with the CID unit. “Wow, dude,” Ari said to Jason. “You’re in the FBI, man. You’re a G-man. Awesome.”

“You are not in the FBI any more than I’m in the freakin’ army,” Kelsey said sternly. She opened the new cellular phone and dialed. “As far as I’m concerned, this is an FBI operation—you two and your gizmos are support, nothing more. The key to the success of our unit is intelligence, not how fast or how high this thing can go.” She said something on the phone, then turned back to Richter and Vega distractedly. “Listen, I have a lot of work to do, and so do you. I think it would be a good idea to pack up the robot here and start heading back to wherever Fort Polk is…”

“Louisiana.”

“…and be prepared to teach my staff all about CID here. But I don’t anticipate we’ll be using it right away.”

“Why not?” Jason asked. “You still prefer to go up against the bad guys with just your little pistol there?”

“The key to a successful investigation, Major, is information—timely, accurate intelligence data, carefully analyzed and strategized,” she responded. “We decide exactly what level of support we need once we’ve studied the suspects and determined their size, strength, composition, and…”

“That’s easy, Special Agent DeLaine—they’re bad guys, not suspects, and they got their hands on a nuclear device,” Jason said. “If we find them, we should go in and shut them down. CID was developed to do that with speed and power. What else is there to do?”

“Folks, I don’t have time to teach you every aspect of a successful investigation while we’re standing here,” Kelsey said impatiently. “I have lots of work to do, and so do you. I’ll meet up with you in New Mexico. Good-bye.” She turned her attention to the cellular phone, dismissing them.

“Wave bye-bye to the nice FBI agent, El Cid,” Jason said. The robot turned toward Kelsey and waved a massive mechanical right hand. Kelsey ignored it. Jason whispered something else to the robot, and it raised its arms and shook its hips in her direction. That she couldn’t ignore. She rolled her eyes and shook her head in exasperation and headed for the exit.

Ari gave the command to retire, and the robot folded itself up so she and Jason could pick it up and stow it in the back of the Humvee. “How soon can you break down the lab and get it ready to move, Ari?” Jason asked.

“No sweat, J,” Vega responded. “My boyfriend broke up with me, so I got nothin’ better to do than work in the lab. This is just freaky, dude, freaky. We’re going to be this top-secret bad-guy hunting posse. Awesome!”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe what, man? You think we’re being scammed or somethin’?”

Jason went into the cab of the Humvee and punched instructions into a small palm-sized computer. Moments later several unusual-looking devices appeared: two large devices that looked like giant cat-sized cockroaches crawled down the walls of the warehouse and over to them; and a trash can–sized device with a ducted fan propulsion system, mechanical arms, and a large telescopic sensor underneath slowly flew over. “I don’t think we’re being told the whole story.”

“You mean that dude Chamberlain? He is for sure one scary-assed bad boy. I mean, schizoid.”

“He’s smart, Ari,” Jason mused. “So why would he pick me for this job? I’m just an engineer. I haven’t been in the field since…well, I’ve never been in the field, unless you count Officer Candidate School or Aberdeen Proving Grounds. And what about DeLaine?”

“I think that Chamberlain guy has got the hots for her.” She glanced at Jason and smiled. “I see you checking her out too, J. You like her too? Want her to put you in handcuffs and interrogate you?”

“She’s an intelligence officer, and obviously the director thinks she’s competent,” Jason said, ignoring Ari’s remarks, “but I don’t get the feeling she’s an experienced field agent either. It looks like Chamberlain picked two newbies to run this task force. Why would he do that?”

“That grunt is gung-ho enough for all of us put together.”

“Jefferson—well, that’s easy: he’s Chamberlain’s spy. He’ll keep a close eye on us for the boss, keep us in line.”

“Well, you and me are the gadget guys, J, and Kelsey DeLaine, the G-babe, will work the intel side,” Ari said. “The grunt will keep everybody in line, and Chamberlain will take all the credit. Sounds pretty simple to me.” She slapped Jason excitedly on the shoulder. “And we get to take El Cid out into the world and take down some really evil characters. I love it!”

Jason retrieved one of the “cockroaches” and plugged it into a computer terminal built into the front cab of the Humvee. It immediately gave him a list of cellular phone calls and radio transmissions that had taken place in the past hour. “FANBOT Two is still outside?”

“Roger,” Ari said. “It’ll follow Chamberlain for another fifteen minutes or so, report on where he goes and where he stops, download his phone calls, then head on back.” She looked over Jason’s shoulder at the intercept log. “His phone is scrambled, so we can’t hear what he’s saying, but we can pick up the numbers he’s calling.”

“Some of them we can’t, apparently,” Jason said. “Completely blank numbers and EINs.”

“Bizarre,” Ari said. “I thought we had every domestic and international ID code programmed into our computers. He’s got a bunch that we’ve never scanned before.”

“Well, he is the National Security Adviser,” Jason mused. “He probably talks with military and government leaders and spooks all over the world. Still…”

“Give me and the kids a few days and we’ll break out the EINs on those calls,” Ari said. “The numbers might take a while longer.”

“See what you can do,” Jason said. “If he’s got untraceable codes then he can probably change them quickly, so it might not help us, but maybe it’ll give us clues on what kind of technology he’s using to block his codes from our scanners.”

“I’m on it, J.”

Jason scrolled through the list of intercepts until he came across a call from Kelsey’s new cellular phone, the one given to them by Chamberlain. Clicking on the item opened up an audio media playback window:

“G-3, Cortez.”

“Hi, Rudy. It’s me. Meeting’s over.”

“New phone, Kel? I didn’t recognize the caller ID.”

“Got it from Chamberlain himself. I’ll fill you in when I get there, but I’m going to need your help. They’re sending me TDY to New Mexico. I need to build a special access server so I can get into my files on the road and search the Bureau’s intelligence database.”

“What for?”

“It’s an antiterrorist project being run by the White House. But get this: they’re pairing me up with this complete Army nerd from Louisiana.”

“That’s harsh, man,” Ari said.

“Shh.”

“Him and his even geekier sidekick have developed this…cyborg…”

“Who’s she calling a geek?” Ari protested.

“Shut it, Ari.”

“Cyborg? You’re kidding me, right?”

“It’s a robot that he can climb inside and it runs and jumps like a bat out of hell and carries cannons on its back and folds up into a suitcase.”

“Bullshit.”

“I saw it myself, Rudy. It’s pretty incredible. But the NSC thinks that we’re going to zip around the world in this thing breaking down doors and mowing down terrorists.”

“You’re shitting me. This will screw up years of investigative work.”

“I think it’s all some big power play by Chamberlain. Don’t worry—I’ll squash the cyber-Rambo wannabes. Anyway, I’m supposed to help set up this task force.”

“No way the director is going to approve you getting involved with this.”

“The director was here, Rudy. He’s not totally convinced, but he gave me the go-ahead.”

“Kingman City has got everyone flustered and running around like chickens with their heads cut off. This is bullshit.”

“I know, I know. I’ll be in major cover-my-ass mode, and I’ll need to protect the director’s six too. Fortunately the army guy and his flunky are barely one or two generations more advanced than a lab rat.”

“Flunky! Who’s she callin’ a flunky?”

“Shh!”

“Aren’t they all?”

“I’ll make sure I’m in charge. I just need you to help me get a secure server set up so I can get into my files, and back me up in case things start going south.”

“No sweat, Kel. If the boss signed off on this, getting the server set up will be a piece of cake. You’ll be able to test it from home tonight. You going to use satellite DES?”

“I’ll likely be moving quite a bit, so yes, I’ll access it via satellite.”

“Got it. Everything will be optimized for secure satellite downlink. Won’t be as fast as what you normally get but it’ll be available anywhere except the Poles.”

“I want to scan for that downlink setup routine,” Jason said.

“No prob, J,” Ari said. “I’ll find out where she lives, set up the Cockroach to monitor, capture the authentication codes, and have it broken in a day or two. Maybe less, if it’s a standard satellite encryption routine.” Jason nodded.

“Where they sending you?”

“Clovis, New Mexico.”

“Bring sunscreen.”

“Anything else on GAMMA?”

“From Brazil—no. But Kingman City, yes. TransGlobal headquarters in San Francisco received a tape, supposedly from GAMMA, warning them to evacuate Kingman City. The tape was never listened to—never even left the fucking mailroom.”

“Oh, shit. Thousands of people might…might have died for nothing.”

“The voice was in English but electronically altered—we might not be able to voiceprint, but we should be able to pick up speech patterns and nuances that can help us build a profile.”

“Did GAMMA leave warnings in Brazil?”

“Yep. Every time. Other places in South America too—other TransGlobal targets too. The latter messages were electronically altered too. We should be able to detect the frequency of the device that alters the voice and come up with a manufacturer.”

“I tell you, Rudy, this task force shit better not be a waste of our time, because I think GAMMA is in Brazil plotting another attack, and we need to break them up and get them behind bars before they bring another nuke into the U.S.”

“Amen.”

“Hey, didn’t Chamberlain used to be an exec with TransGlobal Energy?”

“I think so.”

“That could explain why he wants this task force and robot thing chasing after these terrorists. Maybe he still has an interest in TransGlobal.”

“Aren’t these guys supposed to divest themselves of any financial interest in public companies before they take public office?”

“Yeah. Let’s get someone to check on that.”

“Sure. Well, I better get busy. Talk at you later, Kel.”

“Thanks, Rudy. Later.”

Jason sat back in complete surprise. “Holy shit, the FBI might be on their trail already,” he said. “We have to find out where in Brazil they’re talking about, and we have to get down there as fast as we can.”

“As soon as I break that encryption routine, J, I should be able to look in her files and find out what she has on this GAMMA,” Ari said. “Or maybe once she sets up in New Mexico, she’ll let you look at her goodies…and then maybe she lets you look at her files.”

“Slim chance of either happening, Doc,” Jason said. “Have your guys break her satellite downlink as quickly as they can.”

“You got it. Uh…dude, is there any chance we’ll get in deep shit by crashin’ into the FBI’s computer system?”

“Maybe. But as far as I know, this is what I was told to do—by the fucking National Security Adviser himself.”

“Sweet,” Ari said excitedly. “I’m in but I’m in, man.”

Cascavel, Paraná State, Brazil

A short time later

Originating in the lushly forested highlands of western Paraná near the Paraguay border, the Piquir River was the last of the “living” rivers of Brazil, untouched and unspoiled, once nourishing millions of acres of rain forests and providing food, drinking water, transportation, and a livelihood for thousands who lived along its banks. Some of the towns and villages there had existed for centuries, and its people lived much as they had for the past four generations. As unbelievable as it sounded, it was said that some of the inhabitants who lived along the river had no implements or devices built before the turn of the twentieth century, and some had never before even seen a light-skinned man or woman.

That changed with a single vote of the Third District Regional Federal Tribunal of the Brazilian Federal Court in São Paulo, when it overturned a protective order by a lower court and allowed the construction of the Cascavel Nuclear Power Project. Despite protests by a number of environmental and natives’ rights groups—and, it was said, bolstered by lavish gifts and bribes—the court gave the final go-ahead, and within minutes of the decision the first trees were being bulldozed.

Cascavel was actually planned to include seven state-of-theart reactor facilities; each of the seven plants was larger than any nuclear power plant in the United States—1,500 megawatts each, for a total of 10,500 megawatts capacity. Designed to serve not just Brazil but many of Brazil’s neighboring countries—Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, and even Chile—it was by far the largest nuclear power project in South America and one of the largest in the world. Once completed, each facility was to employ five hundred workers, although only a fraction would be from the state of Paraná—engineers, technicians, and security would mostly be from outside the country.

In order to provide cooling water for the facility as well as power to serve the new towns begun during construction until the plants came online, a hydroelectric dam was built on the Piquir River, which took just over two years to complete. Six hundred meters wide and two hundred meters tall, the plant had four turbines and produced over four hundred megawatts of power. Thousands of natives were employed—some human rights groups charged they were “shanghaied”—to build the dam, and many perished under the difficult, “round-the-clock” working conditions. Then, to add insult to injury, when the dam was completed, the Piquir River ceased to exist…along with hundreds of villages within fifteen kilometers of its banks, some that had existed for centuries. Almost overnight, thousands of inhabitants lost their homes, and millions of acres of rain forests were destroyed.

The newly formed lake was called Repressa Kingman, named for the president of the American company, TransGlobal Energy Corporation, which built the dam and was working on the nearby nuclear power plant as prime contractor for the Brazilian Ministry of Energy. At the dam’s activation, Harold Chester Kingman himself was on hand, and was hailed by energy and commerce ministers from four nations as the benefactor—no, as the savior—of the entire region.

As they stood there atop the gleaming concrete and steel monstrosity, the corrupt politicians and indifferent, unfeeling, uncaring builder could—if they bothered to look—see where the villages, graveyards, churches, schools, and lands of the natives once were. They were covered by twenty meters of water now. In the winter, when the rains slowed and the river’s level went down, it was possible for some families to visit the graveyards of their ancestors and to actually search for their possessions.

The next year the natives again made their way to the bare banks of Repressa Kingman to mourn their loss and try to recover anything of value they could find, but a riot broke out and several private security officers employed by TransGlobal Energy were killed, along with dozens of natives. Days later, the same district courts that opened the way for construction of this facility ordered a halt to the annual procession, and they authorized the state military police, the Polícia Militar do Estado, or PME, to enforce the ban.

The atmosphere in the area surrounding the Cascavel nuclear power plant project today was just as tense as it was that first day. “It looks like they’ve deployed another two hundred PME troops around Unit One,” Jorge Ruiz, Ph.D., said, peering at the Cascavel construction site through a pair of brand-new high-tech binoculars. “And I see more armored cars too—perhaps another dozen surrounding unit one alone. There might be another hundred troops in them.”

“Unit One is scheduled to be powered up soon,” Manuel Pereira, Ruiz’s student and friend, said as he looked through his own binoculars. “Second anniversary of the Repressa riot, Unit One’s activation—I would say that is reason enough for more jack-booted storm troopers, no?”

“Maybe, Manuel,” Ruiz said, lowering the binoculars and slipping his rimless spectacles back on his nose. “It sure seems like an unusually large buildup of forces just for the anniversary of the Piquir massacre. But I’m definitely the wrong guy to ask.”

In a million years he never would have thought he’d have found himself discussing military tactics, Ruiz mused for the umpteenth time that week. Tall, thin, with black curly hair and long, delicate fingers, Dr. Jorge Ruiz was anything but an outdoorsy, gung-ho military type—but circumstances had a way of changing everything and everyone, most times not for the better…

Jorge Ruiz was born in Abaete, Brazil, one hundred and sixty kilometers northwest of Belo Horizonte, the capital city of the state of Minas Gerais. Raised in a Catholic orphanage, adopted by a rancher father and a teacher mother, Jorge and his two adoptive sisters and one brother grew up with the best of everything. In the summer they lived in a small home in Abaete proper, but for most of the rest of the year they lived in a ranch about twenty kilometers outside of town, where they raised Spanish Barb and Mangalarga Marchador horses, turkeys, large floppy-eared Indubrasil cattle, and large blue and white peacocks that were trained like watchdogs.

As a high school student, Jorge received a foreign exchange student scholarship and was sent off to attend school in rural upstate New York. Although leaving his Brazilian family was hard, leaving his American family was even harder—he wept like a baby from the moment he was dropped off at the airport almost until landing in Rio de Janeiro. He vowed right then and there he’d return to the United States.

After attending just two years of college in Belo Horizonte, studying agribusiness to follow in his father’s footsteps, he received a student visa, moved to the United States, and five years later received his bachelor’s degree in agricultural science, a master’s degree in agricultural and environmental education from the University of California at Davis, then a doctorate in global environmental and energy policy from Stanford University. He traveled throughout the United States for the next five years, accepting a number of fellowships and chairs to teach and publish his thoughts on the role of multinational corporations in the development of environmental laws and energy policy.

As much as he loved the United States, his last position, chairing the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business’s Emerging Nations Fellowship, began to change his view of the multinational corporations’ role in the third world. Governments, he found, could be coerced or convinced by the people to better their economies and societies—but the large multinational corporations developing around the world were like stateless dictatorships, virtually unaffected by any codified laws or by the will or desires of their employees. They answered to only one code: greed. Their wealth was enormous and growing every year, and they remained almost completely above the law. If a nation changed its laws to make a situation unfavorable to a corporation, they simply moved to another country where laws were lax or more favorable. The Internet, satellite communications technology, overnight delivery, and high-speed international travel made such moves easy and rarely caused an interruption in business.

Moreover, Ruiz began to be more and more disturbed by the noise, waste, pollution, chaos, and gross excesses of life in the United States—and how the American lifestyle was quickly spreading around the world, especially to his native Brazil. Bound and determined not to see his beloved native country turn in that direction, he decided to return home to see what good his first-class education, training, and experience could do. He immediately accepted a teaching position at the Universidade Federale de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, and was soon named dean of the College of Environmental Studies. Ruiz quickly became known as one of the world’s leading experts on environmental policy and reform.

He was also known as something of a firebrand, a label he didn’t foster but didn’t reject, either. Almost forty years old, a husband and father of a ten-year-old daughter and six-year-old son, Ruiz still thought of himself as a young long-haired radical student and enjoyed nothing more than hanging out at the student union or in the hallways outside his office, sipping strong thick coffee—half espresso, half sugar, thank you very much—smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and arguing with his students and other faculty members on the issues of the day. In the summers he would return to his family ranch and there his students and the world press would find him, ankle-deep in cattle shit, having the time of his life working the ranch and arguing with his extended family around him.

But the Brazilian government was not ready to hear his message. Investments in Brazil by multinational corporations like TransGlobal Energy meant much-needed revenues for the government and assured reelection of its political leaders. The more he fought to restrict or control the influence of the big stateless conglomerates, the more ostracized and isolated he became. He was eventually forced to leave his dean’s position, and he decided to go home to Abaete to his family’s ranch, a move that his detractors encouraged.

But he wasn’t ready to be silent. He continued to publish his thoughts and research on the Internet and submitted op-ed pieces for newspapers and magazines around the world. Many others followed him to the farm. The ranch became a sort of campus-away-from-campus for students, intellectuals, analysts, and soon even economic ministers from governments all over the world.

Jorge Ruiz’s message was simple: rein in the multinational corporations before they took over the world by eliminating the corporate entity and replacing it with individual ownership, responsibility, and accountability. If businesses lay in the hands of a single man or woman, and each and every action was the responsibility of that one person, those responsible would automatically reduce the size of their business to lessen their liability. Wealth would be shared by more and more citizens; laws could be simplified; and the abuses committed by nameless, faceless paper entities would theoretically lessen.

He attracted many students and even some followers, drawn to Abaete by his simple message, simple lifestyle, and real passion for reform. Jorge would hire some of his students on at the ranch, exchanging work for lessons. The classes and lectures soon became an even bigger part of life on the ranch than cattle and horses, and some of the students were hired to be librarians, administrators, graduate assistants, and even security personnel. The ranch and its teaching, lecture, and publishing offices soon became known worldwide as the Grupo do Abaete de la Movimento Meio Ambiente, or GAMMA, the Environmental Movement Group of Abaete.

But Ruiz was not destined for a quiet, peaceful life in rural Minas Gerais.

A hydroelectric dam was under construction on the São Francisco River about forty kilometers north of the ranch. Once completed, the dam would supply electricity to a bauxite mine and aluminum processing plant outside Abaete—but it would also flood almost eight hundred square kilometers of the valley, force the relocation of thousands of citizens, and poison the river downstream with strip-mine and factory pollutants. Ruiz opposed the construction and filed numerous lawsuits to stop it.

One night, masked men invaded his home, poured gasoline in the living room, and set it afire. While his wife collected the children from their rooms, Jorge tried to put out the flames. He was almost overcome with smoke and just managed to crawl outside before the house his family had lived in for five generations burned to the ground.

He found out later that morning that his wife and children never made it out, but were overcome by the smoke and perished in the blaze.

Several days later, the security office of the dam’s construction company, a subcontractor of TransGlobal Energy Corporation, was dynamited, killing a dozen men inside. The letters “GAMMA” were written in blood-red paint six meters tall on the partially completed dam face itself. An announcement sent to media outlets all over the world via the Internet stated that the acronym stood for Guerra Alliance de la Movimento Meio Ambiente, or the Environmental Movement Combat Alliance, declaring war on multinational corporations that polluted the environment and exploited the working people of the world.

Jorge Ruiz was of course the main suspect in the blast. Many saw him as a modern-day Zorro—one man battling the forces of evil around him, no matter how big or powerful. Even in an age of worldwide concern about terrorists claiming to be freedom fighters or patriots, many all over the world cheered him on, supporting him at least with their hearts and words if not their hands or wallets. But Ruiz was nowhere to be found; he was believed to be deep in hiding or perhaps executed by TransGlobal Energy’s rumored death squads.

Instead, here he was, several months later, crawling on his belly in the mud about a kilometer from Repressa Kingman. He and Manuel had been out there for a week and a half, studying the security setup and inching their way—literally—toward various parts of the dam, then inching their way back out. They had been hounded almost every day by ground and air patrols, which got steadily heavier and more persistent every day. But their timing had been perfect, and they managed to avoid giving in to panic as they covertly made their way back to their observation post.

Their mission was successful despite the dramatically added security because of two factors. First and foremost was Manuel Pereira’s skill in the field. He was a former Brazilian army infantryman—every able-bodied man in Brazil had to go through army basic training at age eighteen or after graduating from high school, then had to join a local state military police reserve unit until age forty; Pereira chose to spend three years in the regular army in an American-trained Special Forces infantry unit before joining the reserves. He knew how to move silently, knew how to search for sentries and signs of pursuit. Pereira showed the same joy of teaching Ruiz about moving, hiding, and reconnaissance as Jorge did of professing his love of the environment.

The second reason for their success was heading in their direction at that moment; Manuel spotted them several hundred meters away: three members of the Policia Militar do Estado of the state of Paraná, the PME, armed with submachine guns and pistols, driving an old American open-top Jeep that sputtered and coughed down the dirt construction road.

As it was in the days of military rule, the central government was concerned more with antigovernment insurgents and Communist infiltrators rather than with external threats. In Brazil there were few municipal police departments: law-enforcement duties were handled by the PME, which were locally directed by state public safety officials but organized, trained, and administered by the Brazilian armed forces. Here in Cascavel, as in most of the country, the local gendarmes were very well armed and trained. Like police officers around the world, many officers in the PME moonlighted as security guards for private companies and even individuals—and the biggest private employer of PME officers in the state was TransGlobal Energy. So it was with these men.

But Brazil is a very big country—the fifth-largest in the world in land area—and without strong supervision from state or federal offices, the PME became virtually autonomous, especially in the frontier and jungle regions, answerable to no one except local bosses, wealthy landowners, or military commanders. Many PME officers had been charged with human rights abuses, and steps had been taken over the years to try to more closely supervise the force and punish the offenders, but in the end the old ways worked the best: patronage, fear, guns, retribution, and payola.

Although these men took money from the Brazilian government to maintain order in Paraná and from TransGlobal to provide private security for the construction site, they also took money from a third source: GAMMA. They and a number of others had been recruited by Ruiz’s second in command, an ex–oil executive from Russia turned activist by the name of Yegor Viktorvich Zakharov, to simply look the other way when requested.

The PME soldiers stopped their Jeep just a few meters from where Ruiz and Pereira were hiding, at a bend in the construction road that would partially hide them from the guard towers back at the construction site. They were making an awful lot of noise. They searched the area carefully, looking right at the two men hiding in the bushes several times, then returned to the Jeep. Ruiz was then surprised when one of them pulled out a bottle of cachaça—liquor similar to rum, fermented from sugarcane juice—and took a sip. Pereira pulled a suppressed .45 caliber IMBEL-GC Pistol-45 from a shoulder holster and aimed it at the men; Ruiz pulled his pistol, a suppressed .380 caliber IMBEL-GC Pistol-380, but did not aim it. He was not yet comfortable with aiming a gun at another human being, although every day in the jungle was slowly but surely changing his mindset.

“Don’t turn around,” Pereira said.

The man drinking from the bottle took a shallow swig, passed the bottle, then started taking off his web belt and undoing his fatigue trousers, getting ready to take a piss. “You two fucks are about two minutes away from getting your asses caught,” he said. “They brought in more security in armored vehicles. The first patrol is on its way out.”

“We’ve seen them—they’re deploying them over at Unit One, not out here,” Pereira said. “Why in hell are you out here drinking, puta?”

“Because this is outside our normal patrol route—we’ll need a reason why we’re out so far from the construction site. If they spot us from the towers, they’ll see us drinking, and TransGlobal will probably fire us. I wouldn’t want to be around when you two get caught anyway.”

“You already have your money and your escape plan,” Ruiz said. “All we need to know is if our packages are secure.”

“No one has touched your packages,” one of the soldiers said. “That is our normal patrol route and our responsibility. Don’t worry.”

“Then why the hell don’t you just get out?”

“Because I want to see it with my own eyes when you set it off.”

“What in hell are you talking about?” Ruiz asked. “Are you crazy, or just drunk?”

The soldiers looked confused. “It’s not every day you see a nuke go off,” one of the other soldiers remarked.

“Do you wear just sunglasses, or do you wear special goggles?” another asked. “Are we far enough away here? It looks awful close.”

Ruiz and Pereira looked at each other in total shock. “What are you talking about?” Pereira exclaimed finally.

“You guys don’t know?” the first soldier asked incredulously. “Shit no, you don’t, because you’ve been crawling around out here in the mud for the past week. All hell has broken loose in America, and you guys are responsible for it. You’ve just been declared the number-one terrorist organization in the whole fucking world, way ahead of al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad…”

Ruiz looked at Pereira, his mouth open in surprise. “What happ…?”

But at that moment, they heard the soldier’s radio crackle. The man listened, then responded. “They’re starting to seal up the entire complex, boys, including the dam. I think your stash of explosives down by the garbage pit was found.”

“I thought you said…!”

“Fuck what I said, asshole. I secured them the best I could.”

“Damn you!” Ruiz holstered his pistol and turned his binoculars toward the dam. He and Pereira had already hidden about a hundred kilos of high explosives in various sections of the dam, getting ready to blow it up in the next couple days; they had planned to plant another fifty kilos, but that was going to be impossible now. They had no desire to make martyrs of themselves, so the plan was to get safely away first—but now it looked like that was not possible either. Sure enough, he saw several dozen soldiers running toward the dam, with a helicopter starting to move into position. Ruiz turned back toward the PME soldiers. “Why didn’t you tell us…?”

“Because then we couldn’t capture you before the dam blew, assholes,” the soldier said. Ruiz turned. Pereira was still pointing his pistol at the first soldier, but the other two soldiers now had their M-16 rifles aimed at them. “Drop your pistol, Pereira, or my comrades will open fire.”

“You bastard,” Pereira breathed. “You’ll be the first to die if there’s any shooting.”

“You won’t be able to spend all the money you’ve been squeezing out of both sides if you’re dead,” Ruiz reminded him.

“Don’t be stupid, both of you,” the soldier said. “You don’t want to die out here lying in the mud and bushes—neither do I. I take you in, I get the reward money for capturing a saboteur, I get the hell out of the state, and you have Zakharov and your other supporters spring you from prison. Everyone keeps a clear head and we get out of this alive.”

“The TransGlobal Energy security forces won’t let us live,” Pereira said. “They’ll interrogate and torture us, then dispose of us.”

“I’ve notified your buddy Zakharov to arrange with the PME and the state tribunal to take you into custody right away—TransGlobal won’t get their hands on you, as long as you do everything I say.” He looked overhead. One of the TransGlobal Energy security force helicopters that had been patrolling the northwest face of the dam was now slowly heading in their direction. “They’ll be watching everything we do, and if you resist, they’ll likely kill you. Do as I say, and I will stay in control of this situation. Now drop the guns and let’s go.”

“Jorge?” Pereira asked in a low voice. “I think I can tag at least two of them…you might be able to get away…”

“No,” Ruiz said. “We tried. Put the gun down.” Pereira reluctantly dropped his pistol.

The PME soldier radioed to the TransGlobal security chief that he had two prisoners and was going to take them to the security force headquarters in Cascavel. The helicopter kept on approaching, very slowly, staying at least fifty to sixty meters away. They could now see a TransGlobal security officer sitting in the helicopter’s open right-side doorway, wearing sunglasses and a headset, with what appeared to be a hunting rifle with a large telescopic sight affixed, safely pointing out the door but not upraised or aimed at anyone on the ground.

“He will not hesitate to shoot you in the head if you resist, Ruiz,” the soldier repeated. “Those TransGlobal sharpshooters are damned good, I must admit. Now, first, hand over the detonators to the explosives you set on the dam.”

“Your greed has destroyed you,” Ruiz said. One of the other soldiers had climbed behind the wheel of the Jeep and started it up; the other lit up a cigarette, cradling his rifle in his arms.

“Shut up and hand them over, Ruiz,” the leader said. He nodded to the third soldier, then motioned with his head toward Pereira. “Handcuff that one and search him.” The soldier nodded, then slung his rifle over his shoulder as he took a deep drag of his cigarette and reached in a rear pocket for handcuffs.

Pereira used that moment of distraction to move. The first soldier may have been anticipating his move, because he had the gun trained on him the entire time, but Pereira was quick and managed to get a hand on the pistol…but he wasn’t quick enough to keep him from firing. Pereira was hit in the right shoulder. He cried out and rolled to his right, but he didn’t go down. Instead, he grabbed the second soldier’s rifle out of the front seat. Struggling through the pain, he flicked off the safety and tried to level it at the first soldier, but he had lost all strength in his right arm.

“Too late, Pereira,” the first soldier said with a smile. The helicopter was hovering, now less than forty meters away. The shooter in the door had already raised his rifle and was taking aim. Pereira thought about trying to dive atop Ruiz before the gunner took them both out, but just then he saw the gunner’s body buck and a puff of smoke jet from his rifle’s muzzle…

…and the first soldier’s head disappeared in a cloud of red gore. The heads of the two other PME soldiers disappeared seconds later. Three head shots, three kills, from forty meters away, in about three seconds. Whoever was in that helicopter was a damned good shot, Ruiz thought.

The gunman in the door motioned for Ruiz and Pereira to follow, and then the helicopter translated to a wide spot in the construction road a few hundred meters away. Ruiz supported Pereira as they trotted over to it. The gunman was aiming his rifle toward them, scanning over their shoulders for any sign of pursuit. As they approached, the gunman took his sunglasses off…

…and when Ruiz saw that it was none other than Yegor Viktorvich Zakharov, a wave of relief washed over him: saved once again by Yegor Zakharov, the guardian angel of GAMMA.

The sharpshooter helped Pereira into a seat in the helicopter and fastened his seat belt for him. “Muito obrigado,” Ruiz shouted over the roar of the helicopter’s jet engine. Instead of trying to respond over the noise, Zakharov motioned with his right thumb as if pressing a button—he was telling Ruiz to detonate the explosives. “But they are not all planted yet!” he shouted.

“Are you crazy?” Zakharov asked, shouting. In a flash of motion, he raised his Dragunov sniper rifle to his shoulder, aimed toward Ruiz, and fired. Ruiz felt as if he had been slapped in the face by a red-hot paddle as the muzzle blast pounded him…but he wasn’t hit. He looked over his shoulder just as another TransGlobal Energy Security Force Jeep, with a headless driver behind the wheel, careened into a tree about seventy meters behind him. “Blow whatever you got out there and let’s get the hell out of here!” Zakharov shouted. His voice was serious, but he was smiling, like a father admonishing his young son for swearing moments after scoring the game-winning goal.

Ruiz needed no more prompting. He withdrew a small detonator from his pocket, punched in an unlock code, and hit a red button, holding the unit aloft to be sure its radio signal got out cleanly. But Zakharov wasn’t going to wait. He shouted, “Either it will work or it won’t, Jorge. Let’s go!” then lowered his rifle and grabbed Ruiz by the front of his shirt, pulling him headfirst into the chopper. His feet had barely left the ground before the helicopter lifted off…

…and the helicopter was barely a kilometer away when the first charge went off, followed quickly by three more. Ruiz and Pereira had hidden four twenty-five-kilo charges on various parts of the dam, designed not to cause a catastrophic failure—they would not have been able to hump in enough explosives to do that, unless they were nuclear devices—but to weaken the structure enough that work on the reactor units would have to be stopped while the dam was inspected and repaired. That could take months, maybe years, and cost TransGlobal millions—hopefully.

Ruiz looked at the dam as best he could while he fastened his safety belt and donned his headset. “I couldn’t tell if all the charges went off or if the face was damaged,” he said. “All that work for nothing.”

“You got out with your skin and struck a blow for our cause—that is enough for now,” Zakharov said casually, lowering his Dragunov.

“I thought you said those PME guys were trustworthy, Zakharov,” Pereira said angrily.

Yegor Viktorvich Zakharov safetied his sniper rifle, removed the magazine, and ejected the live round from the chamber, leaving the action open. “I did say that, Manuel—but as we all know, money speaks louder than words,” he said in very good Portuguese, laced with a thick Russian accent, like percebes—boiled barnacles—served on fine china. “There is more money than law, authority, morality, or evil out here in western Paraná these days. I guess we just didn’t come up with the right amount of it, and TransGlobal did.”

Jorge Ruiz sometimes wished he had the life experience and real-world wisdom of men like Pereira and Zakharov, not just his ivory-towered view of right and wrong. He was right, of course—Yegor Zakharov was most often right, at least when it came to operations like this.

Yegor Viktorvick Zakharov was a former Strategic Rocket Forces brigade commander within the Eleventh Corps, the Black Raiders of the Napoleonic Wars and World War Two fame, headquartered in Kirov, four hundred and eighty kilometers east of Moscow. Large, barrel-chested, and square-jawed, he was a very imposing figure and seemed to be the archtypical Soviet warrior. He was a trained military pilot and an expert marksman, as he’d demonstrated just now and quite often to their men; he was also a weapons expert, intimate with everything from pistols to nuclear weapons and everything in between. He liked to drink straight vodka but would make do with strong Brazilian agua ardente; he had a grudging liking for American whiskey because it made him feel that he was absorbing some secret or clue to the American psyche with every bottle he consumed. Zakharov loved his women as much as his alcohol and, although a husband and father of two sons and a daughter who lived somewhere in the Caribbean, was never without a woman or two in the evenings.

During the Cold War, Zakharov commanded seven regiments of medium-and intermediate-range surface-to-surface missiles, including the SS-12, SSC-1 cruise missile, and SS-15 mobile ballistic missile, all capable of carrying high-explosive, chemical, biological, or nuclear warheads. His assignment, in case of a massive attack by NATO forces against Moscow, was to blanket Eastern Europe with missiles to stop any thoughts of occupying Russian territory—a modern version of the “scorched Earth” policy used by the Black Raiders in their campaigns against Napoleon and Hitler.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the advent of more and more onerous arms-control agreements, it was made clear to Zakharov that after twenty-two years his services were no longer required by his beloved country, so he took what was left of his measly pension and went into the growing private sector. He became a security officer with the giant Russian oil company KirovPyerviy, one of Russia’s largest private oil companies outside Siberia. He rose quickly in status, power, and wealth, and soon became a vice president. Many believed he would enter politics, but as an ultranationalist his views were not very popular with the Russian Duma, which sought a more centrist leader whom they could use to extract partnerships and favorable financing agreements with the West. Zakharov continued to be an outspoken critic of Russia’s growing rapprochement with the West in general and the United States in particular.

Then, the unthinkable happened: the Russian government, which—as was true for all oil and gas companies in Russia—was the principal shareholder in KirovPyerviy, sold its shares of the company to the American oil giant TransGlobal Energy Corporation. Although Zakharov had overnight become a multibillionaire from the value of his own shares in the company, he was outraged and felt betrayed. A foreign company—an American company in particular—owned a majority stake in a large Russian oil firm! It was the very thing he had been warning the Russian people about for years, but he never truly believed it would ever come to pass.

It was too much to stomach. Zakharov dumped his shares and sold all of his belongings in his hometown of Kirov. It was widely known that he had many residences and mistresses all over the world, particularly in South America and Southeast Asia, but he had virtually disappeared overnight…

…until one day, about a year after he left KirovPyerviy, Yegor Viktorvich Zakharov mysteriously appeared in Ruiz’s base camp near Porto Feliz, about ninety kilometers northwest of São Paulo, and pledged his personal, financial, and moral support for Ruiz’s guerrilla organization. He admitted he used contacts and resources within the Russian Eleventh Corps, along with his skills and intuition as a security officer and military man, to locate Ruiz and his GAMMA organization. But he tried to assure Ruiz and his followers that he was not here to spy on them but to offer his services and support to the cause.

At first everyone was wary and believed him to be working undercover for the government—until they saw Zakharov kill a Policia Militar do Estado officer with his own hands on a raid near Macae. The usually cold, indifferent Brazilian state military police would not favor an undercover agent killing one of their own, even a highly placed informant—there appeared to be no doubt that he was tapping into his own connections and resources to assist GAMMA. Slowly but surely, Ruiz was won over. Zakharov was charismatic, powerful, wealthy, and committed to the cause of breaking down all multinational corporations. His focus of course was on TransGlobal Energy, the company that financed the corruption of the Russian government and the betrayal of the Russian working class, but he participated in all of Ruiz’s operations with equal zeal.

Since his sudden arrival, GAMMA quickly had plenty of skilled, highly effective men and women working in various operations, mostly involving direct attacks on security forces belonging to large corporations—men and women who weren’t afraid to get their hands bloody. They were much different than the usual “treehuggers” who belonged to GAMMA: they knew explosives, sabotage, intimidation, and even darker arts, but they seemed to be genuinely dedicated to the cause and devoted to Zakharov and, therefore, to Jorge Ruiz and GAMMA. They also brought extremely useful, incredibly detailed, first-class, near-real-time intelligence information. Many were Russian, but men and women of action from all over the world followed Zakharov. The leadership of GAMMA did not change, which suited the membership fine. Jorge Ruiz stayed in control and was forever the spiritual and inspirational leader, but Yegor Viktorvich Zakharov quickly became second in command and the man in charge of direct action operations.

There appeared to be a great deal of excitement and energy on the ground as the helicopter set down in their encampment, a remote clearing in the forest about sixty kilometers from Cascavel. The men and women were busy breaking down the camp and packing up, ready to scatter and head to their temporary base, but something else was definitely stirring—Ruiz could feel it, even before they touched down. He looked at his trusted friend Manuel Pereira with concern. “I like seeing our people happy after a successful mission, Manuel,” he said on the interphone, “but this is rather unusual.” Zakharov glanced at him and smiled but said nothing and continued idly checking his rifle.

“They could not have heard about Cascavel, Jorge,” Pereira said. “We are under strict comm security. Something else has happened.”

“I could use some good news,” Ruiz said cheerfully. Pereira glanced at Zakharov; he nodded but offered nothing else.

They were being congratulated and thumped on the back and shoulders from the moment the chopper touched ground. Ruiz wanted to ask what had them so excited, but a stern glare from Zakharov scattered the crowd. “I want the camp ready to roll in ten minutes—that’s how long it will take for the first PME helicopters to arrive if they successfully tracked us,” he told his aide in Russian. A tall, powerful, steel-blue-eyed former Russian army captain by the name of Pavel Khalimov, he barked an order in Portuguese.

Zakharov led them to his tent, which was always the last to be taken down and the first to be set up in a new forward operating location. He poured a shot of chilled vodka for each of them—despite their austere living conditions when in the field, Zakharov always had chilled vodka—offered them a slice of salted cucumber already prepared beside the bottle, then raised his glass. “Za vashe zdarov’ye!” he said, and downed the vodka in one gulp, chasing it with the cucumber. “Another successful mission. Well done!” Ruiz did the same.

Pereira took a tiny sip, nibbled at the cucumber, then took a big drink from his canteen. “Something has happened,” he said, looking at Zakharov carefully. “The men are jubilant like I have never seen them before. A few are scared.”

“Yes, something has happened,” Zakharov said casually. He cast an amused glance at the Brazilian ex-soldier. “But would it kill you to drink to our success like a man and not a sissy, Sergeant Pereira?”

“And the PME pigs that betrayed us said something about being too close to the dam and never having seen one before,” Pereira went on, ignoring Zakharov’s request. “They weren’t talking about watching a few satchels of Semtex go off.”

“Who cares what those traitors were saying, Manuel?” Ruiz asked curiously. He hated to see any discord between his senior officers, but he wondered what in hell Pereira was trying to get at. Zakharov didn’t look perturbed or worried—but then again, he never did. “They were getting ready to arrest us and turn us over to TransGlobal’s storm troopers—they were just blathering.”

“Were they, Zakharov?” Pereira asked. “Or were they talking about something else?”

Zakharov hesitated, adopting a faraway expression as he poured himself another shot of vodka. Now Ruiz was getting very concerned. “Yegor…?”

“Harold Kingman has been very seriously hurt today, tavarisch,” Zakharov said, a satisfied smile on his face. “We have won a major victory and advanced our cause tremendously.”

“What are you talking about, Yegor?” Ruiz asked.

“It means, Jorge, that he went ahead and did what he said he could do—he attacked a TransGlobal plant in the United States itself,” Pereira said ominously, carefully watching Zakharov for any sign of evasion or contradiction. “He has been telling our soldiers that he could attack Kingman on his own soil, in his own backyard, with weapons of mass destruction—apparently now he has done so.”

Ruiz looked first at Pereira, then at Zakharov. “Is this true, Yegor?”

“What I have done is take the fight to the enemy,” Zakharov said easily. “I showed that Kingman and his lackeys in Washington are not immune to attack in their own land.”

“You mean…you attacked a TransGlobal facility in the United States…?”

“You did not expect us to just keep on attacking facilities in South America, did you, Jorge?” Zakharov asked with mock surprise. “Harold Kingman cares nothing for the people of other nations, least of all in South America. You are just sources of cheap labor and land to him. If you want to get the attention of men like him, you need to hit him where he’ll really feel it and where more people will be able to witness his defeat—and there is no better place to hit a man than right where he lives.”

Ruiz was stunned. He knew of course that he would one day have to take his fight to his beloved America—he fully expected to die there, either in a gunfight with American police officers or killed while in prison by one of TransGlobal’s hired assassins, perhaps a prison guard or another inmate. And Yegor Zakharov had always said that he was going to get Kingman where he lived—Ruiz always believed he was just bragging, although he also knew that if anyone could do it, Zakharov could. But attacking Kingman in the United States was something Ruiz only prayed he’d live long enough to do.

“Well,” he said a bit hesitantly, “I think congratulations are in order.” He raised his shot glass, and Zakharov refilled it. “Za vashe zdarov’ye.”

“Spasibo,” Zakharov responded, draining then refilling his glass. Without looking, he said to Pereira, “You still won’t drink with us, Sergeant?”

“I would like a debriefing on the attack in the United States, Zakharov,” Pereira said.

“And I would like you to show a little more respect, Sergeant…”

“I am not a sergeant any longer, Zakharov, and from what you have told us, you are no longer a Russian colonel, either,” Pereira said acidly. “So shall we stop with the military lingo?”

“Very well, Pereira,” Zakharov said. “But I don’t appreciate this treatment I’m getting from you. I’m sorry about those PME turn-coats, but there was nothing I could do about them—once a traitor, always a traitor. I came to cover your withdrawal, and I’m damned glad I was there when they pulled guns on you.”

“So are we,” Ruiz interjected, trying to defuse this suddenly tense situation.

“I am not talking about Cascavel, Zakharov,” Pereira said, “although I have many questions about that incident as well…”

“Oh, really? Such as?”

“Such as how you happened to be there at the exact moment those soldiers tried to capture us.”

“I was covering your withdrawal, Manuel, I told you,” Zakharov said. “We back each other up on every mission…”

“You weren’t planned to be at Cascavel.”

“What difference does it make, Manuel—he rescued us, we’re still alive, and that’s it,” Ruiz said, more forcefully this time. “If he was working with the PME, why would he have killed all three of them? Why would he even have risked his life to go to Cascavel?”

Pereira fell silent. Zakharov smiled broadly. “Two good questions, eh, Manuel?” he asked. “I could have made a deal with those PME soldiers and split the reward money with them. There is a reward of one million reals for you two, you know—dead or alive. Does that not deserve even a little ‘thank you,’ Pereira?”

“Thank you, sir,” he said quickly. “Now, about the attack in the United States…?”

Ruiz shook his head and started to speak, but Zakharov raised a hand to him. “It’s all right, Jorge. Manuel is a volunteer, a good fighter, a dedicated member of our cause, and a senior member of the GAMMA leadership—he has earned the right to ask questions.” Zakharov put down the vodka and took a seat. “I had been planning an attack in the United States for many months. I assembled a corps of loyal soldiers, helped procure disguises, vehicles, materials, and false documents, and executed the plan when I determined that the conditions were most favorable. It appears that the operation was successful.”

“Which was?”

“The destruction of TransGlobal’s oil and natural gas transshipment facility and oil refinery in Houston, Texas.”

“ ‘Destruction?’ ” Ruiz asked. “Are you saying you destroyed the facility? You destroyed an oil refinery?”

“How did you do this?” Pereira asked immediately. “That would require tens of thousands of kilos of high explosives, with dozens of trained men to plant them over a long period of time. And Kingman City is one of TransGlobal’s largest and most secure facilities in the United States—approaching that plant with the manpower it would have taken would be almost impossible…unless…” And at that, Manuel Pereira stopped and looked aghast at Zakharov. The Russian’s expression told him that his guess was true. “Nao…nao…impossivel…inacreditavel…”

“What is it, Manuel?” Ruiz asked. “What are you saying? Why does it matter how Yegor pulled it off? It is a great victory for our cause! A major refinery and shipment facility right in the United States—striking at the heart of the global multinational corporation’s organization has always been our biggest objective. He has…”

“Do you not see what Zakharov has done, sir?” Pereira asked incredulously. “He has ensured that the wrath of the entire American law-enforcement machine and probably their military as well will rain down on us!”

“I’m not afraid of them, Manuel,” Ruiz said confidently, although casting a puzzled glance between his two closest comrades. “The more they fight, the more attention will be drawn to our cause. They will know that…”

“You do not understand, Jorge,” Pereira said in a low, fearful voice. “Zakharov used some sort of a weapon of mass destruction in Kingman City.” He stared accusingly at Zakharov. “What was it? A firebomb? A tanker truck loaded with explosives? A…?” He saw Zakharov’s eyes glitter, and his eyes widened in shock. “Nao…you used a nuclear weapon?”

“Is…is this true, Yegor?” Ruiz asked, after turning a stunned expression toward the Russian.

“You are being a bit overdramatic, aren’t you, Manuel?” Zakharov asked with a glint of humor in his eyes.

“Overdramatic? You destroy an American petroleum complex with a nuclear weapon, and you accuse me of being ‘overdramatic’?”

“We have discussed this many, many times in the past,” Zakharov said, his voice becoming a bit edgier. He poured himself another shot of vodka. “We explored the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons developed and produced by the very companies we are seeking to hold accountable!—in our attacks. I told you I might be able to get one or more of these weapons and that I would do so, at my own expense, if the opportunity presented itself and if it was operationally safe to do so. I believe the reason you accepted my offer to assist you in your struggle was precisely because I know how to procure and use such devices.”

“We never spoke about using one in the United States of America…!”

“We most certainly did, Manuel, and precisely for the reasons you just outlined—it would be impossible to attack any facilities in the United States and do any significant damage without high-yield weapons of mass destruction,” Zakharov argued. “Now, whether you actually did not believe that we would ever accomplish such an attack is your failing, not mine. Do not punish me because I took the initiative, based on our discussions and goals. The cause is just, the reasons adequate, the opportunity clear, and the losses and consequences acceptable; so, I acted. That is what a good soldier does. Is that not correct, Sergeant?”

“Stop calling me that, Zakharov!” Pereira snapped. “And stop trying to include me in this insane scheme of yours! I had nothing to do with it.”

“Wait, Manuel, just wait a minute!” Ruiz interjected. His head was still swirling in confusion. “We have got to think about this. We need to…”

“Comrades, the deed is done, the enemy engaged,” Zakharov said casually. “You wanted the fight taken to the doorstep of the enemy—I have seen to it. In the end, the method doesn’t matter one bit. Yes, the Americans and perhaps the world will shriek and hide with horror and call us monsters, but it will also call attention to our cause.” Pereira remained defiant, angrily staring at Zakharov; Ruiz still looked confused and frightened. “Is this not what you wanted, Jorge? Do you want to strike out at the company that murdered your wife and children, or not?”

“Zakharov, do not…”

“Yes…yes, I do,” Ruiz said weakly. “I have dedicated my life to seeing that corporate murderers like Kingman and TransGlobal Energy are destroyed. But to use a nuclear weapon…my God, I never believed it would ever happen. The devastation must be horrible, absolutely horrible…”

“Trust me, Jorge, the devastation is the same with a high-explosive device as with a small nuclear device,” Zakharov assured him with a fatherly pat on the shoulder that Pereira thought completely emotionless and insincere. “Look at the effects of American firebombing campaigns in Germany and Japan and their napalm attacks in Southeast Asia: millions killed or maimed by nothing but gasoline and incendiary devices. A cluster bomb the size of a baseball, or a bullet the size of a pea, kills just as surely and just as gruesomely as a nuclear device. Are we going to cease our campaign and surrender because we happen to use a weapon that creates ‘more bang for the buck’? I think not.” He looked at Pereira and added smugly, “Or maybe I am wrong, Manuel? Do you think I was wrong?”

“All of our attacks have always been discussed, planned, and coordinated in advance,” Pereira said. He had to grudgingly admit that Zakharov was making a good point here: what exactly was the difference? Dead is dead, no matter how it happens. But it infuriated him to see Zakharov’s smug expression as the Russian realized that Pereira was weakening. Zakharov was just too clever and too…efficient was the only word. Pereira went on. “We prepare leaflets and broadcasts to warn innocent civilians to leave the area; we try to minimize the impact of our attacks to the environment and the land. We are not murderers, Zakharov—at least we were not until today! We are supposed to be defenders of the oppressed, not slayers of them!”

“Come down from your heavenly perch in the clouds and join the real world, Manuel,” Zakharov said. “All of our attacks have killed innocent persons—the only way not to do so would be to expose members of our group to capture. But I will have you know that the brave patriot who executed the operation in Texas did send a warning message to a local radio station and did in fact try to warn men and women around the TransGlobal facility away—he even tried to warn a TransGlobal security officer of the attack.”

“How in hell do you know that, Zakharov?”

“I kept in constant communication with our man and monitored his movements at all times,” Zakharov responded. “After all, he was carrying a very valuable weapon, one not easy to replace, and I wanted to make sure he carried out his assignment exactly as planned. He did a superb job. He had befriended several security personnel at the facility and got to know them personally, so before he set off his device he tried to warn them to get away from the area. They did not, of course—Harold Kingman would have had the man skinned and boiled alive if he had left his post and survived when others left behind perished. Our man was under orders not to try to give such a warning if he felt it would jeopardize the mission, but I left it up to him. He both issued a warning and accomplished his mission. As for the taped radio message, I do not know. He was supposed to have delivered it the same day as the attack, but it was a weekend and perhaps the lazy Americans didn’t bother to open it.”

“All right, all right, everyone relaxe,” Ruiz said. He was obviously relieved that his two comrades were starting to find a middle ground here, which allowed Ruiz to focus on the ramifications of this very unexpected, horrifying news. “There’s nothing we can do right now. We’re all tired, and we need to rest and think.” Zakharov didn’t look tired in the least, and his rather exasperated expression confirmed it, but he said nothing. “I suggest we all go to safe houses as planned while our camp is broken down and moved, then meet in a few days’ time after we get a chance to assess the American reaction to the attack and decide how it will affect our future operations.”

“Let’s make it one day,” Zakharov said. “We need to best decide on how to capitalize on this successful event.”

“Let’s make it a month,” Pereira spat. “You think you can just march into another American city now, after an attack with nuclear weapons? Every soldier and law-enforcement officer in the country will be out looking for us. The Brazilian government will hand us over or kill us just to show they’re cooperating with the United States.”

“Everyone will be running scared,” Zakharov said confidently. “Yes, law enforcement will be mobilized—they’ll scoop up all the usual suspects, make a few hundred arrests, and declare victory. After a short time, things will return to normal, except more Americans will stay in their homes, watch the world from the comfort of their television sets, and fret over the losses in their investment portfolios.”

“Easy for you to say,” Pereira said. “Anyone with colored skin will be considered a suspect.”

“Bastantes! Aquele é bastante!” Ruiz said wearily. “I do not want to argue about this again. We will use all of our best information and resources to determine the best time to meet again. Until then, we will all keep a low profile, gather as much data as we can about our targets all over the world, and come up with recommendations. When it is safe to do so, we will meet and decide on a plan of action.” He grasped both Zakharov’s and Pereira’s hands in his. “There is much work to be done, meus amigos bons. Colonel Zakharov has struck a mighty blow for our cause, but the fight is not yet over, and I feel it will become more difficult. We must be strong and united until our common enemy is brought down. Sim?” When he did not receive a response from either of them, he grasped their hands tighter. “Agreed?” Finally Pereira and Zakharov nodded and shook hands. “Muito bem. Good luck to you, my friends. May God be with you both.” Pereira endured a stern glare from Zakharov’s aide Khalimov, but he was accustomed to that—and the aide was not so tough without his boss nearby, Pereira knew, so he didn’t concern himself with the big Russian.

“That peasant Pereira deserves another helicopter ride, Colonel—I would be happy to show him the sights of, for example, the Atlantic Ocean, about two hundred miles offshore,” Khalimov said.

Zakharov thought for a moment, then: “Track him to his safe house—somewhere in São Paulo or Santos, along the wharves I think. When he’s safely inside, contact our man in the PME and have him arrested. They can publicize his capture, but then I need for Pereira to try to escape or try to kill a guard, at which time the people of Brazil should be spared the expense of securing, trying, and incarcerating him.”

“Da, rookavadeeteel,” Khalimov said, grinning. “Ya paneemayoo.”

“I want to meet with our strike leaders at the farm first thing tomorrow night.”

“They will be there, sir,” Khalimov said.

Zakharov smiled and nodded. With Pereira out of the way and Ruiz scared out of his wits, the operation was looking better and better all the time. Zakharov gulped another shot of vodka, disappointed as ever that his favorite drink got so warm so quickly in this damnable forest, then headed out to his waiting armored sedan.

About an hour later, Yegor Zakharov’s car pulled off the main highway into São Paulo onto a two-lane road that twisted through farms and patches of forest. After another thirty minutes’ drive, he turned down a dirt road and a few minutes later approached a comfortable-looking adobe farmhouse with a red tile roof, an expansive walled courtyard in front, and a barn and a maid’s quarters in back. The car drove immediately into the barn, and the doors were quickly closed by men armed with machine guns. Khalimov got out of the driver’s seat, withdrew a submachine gun, and carefully kept guard while several men approached Zakharov’s car. The men saluted as Zakharov emerged from the sedan.

“Report,” the ex-Russian Strategic Rocket Forces Colonel ordered.

“All secure, sir,” one of the men reported. “No unusual activity in this area, and the commandante of the local PME barracks reports no unusual movement or strangers in the area. Radio traffic is routine.” He handed Zakharov transcripts of local radio and telephone conversations.

“The airspace?”

“Last PME patrol aircraft flyover was yesterday, sir,” the man reported. “Photos and identification are in the report. One American Keyhole-class photoreconnaissance satellite over our area—its orbit is elliptical, optimized for the northern hemisphere, but obviously it can be adjusted quickly to scan our area. Next flyover will be in six and a half hours.”

Zakharov nodded. The lower-altitude intelligence satellites were easy to avoid or spoof—it was the high-altitude satellites and the unmanned long-range drones that were the real threat. The best tactic was to avoid all exposure as much as possible—change codes, shift frequencies, alter timetables and travel routes, and move from place to place as much as possible to cover their tracks.

Zakharov dismissed the security men and stepped outside to a shaded patio to get out of the hot sun. Pavel Khalimov, his submachine gun now hanging on a snap-cord around his neck so he could quickly raise it, approached him, holding a portable satellite phone. “He has called twice now, sir,” he said simply.

“Let him call. It is far safer for him than it is for me.” But at that moment the phone rang. Zakharov swore under his breath and motioned for the phone. “Have you ever heard of communications security?” he asked in Russian, after engaging the security circuits.

“Just a friendly warning—stay out of the United States for a while,” the caller said in Russian. The voice was being altered with an electronic scrambler—it changed every few seconds from a high-pitched whine to a very low-pitched moan, so much so that it was impossible to decipher even if it was male or female. “The FBI, CIA, and every American military investigative unit will be…”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard it before,” Zakharov snapped. “Listen, you wanted TransGlobal to bleed, and now they’re bleeding. You think anyone was going to pay attention to attacks in Panama or Egypt?”

“Just a word to the wise, that’s all, you big asshole,” the voice said affably. “Every government agency is going to be on the lookout. We don’t want to spoil the big finale. Everything is on schedule and going according to plan—just don’t blow it now by being too anxious. Concentrate on the African and European target list I’ve already given you. Stay out of sight for a few weeks.”

“Stop telling me what to do, zalupa!” Zakharov shouted. “If you had the guts to do what I have done, you would have done the same. You know damned well that Kingman’s base of power is the United States. You want him destroyed, my friend, then you go to America.”

“You did a fine job, Colonel,” the caller said. “I’d hate to have such a fine career cut short. Once again, a friendly word of advice: stay out of the United States.” And the call was terminated. Fifteen seconds from start to finish—even when angry and wishing to chew one of his subordinates out, Zakharov thought, the chief of the Consortium maintained the strictest communications security. The most sophisticated eavesdropping systems in the world—TEMPEST, Petaplex, Echelon, Enigma, Sombrero—couldn’t intercept, lock, and triangulate a satellite call in less than fifteen seconds.

But he had to grudgingly hand it to him: the head of the Consortium, known to Zakharov only by his code name Deryektar, the Director, was one cold-blooded son of a bitch. He had money, lots of it, and he wasn’t squeamish about where to spend it as long as whatever happened furthered his objectives.

Fuck him, Zakharov thought. He was running scared. Yegor Viktorvich Zakharov had just become the greatest and most deadly terrorist in the world—he wasn’t about to run and hide now.

“What is the plan now, Colonel?” Khalimov asked.

“A few days to rest while you find Pereira’s safe house,” Zakharov replied. Operational security procedures, instituted by himself—Ruiz was not tactically smart enough to set up such rules—detailed that individual members of GAMMA did not know where the others’ safe houses were located. They used blind phone, letter, and e-mail drops to communicate while in hiding, then set up a different meeting location every time to plan the next operation. “I need to find out what the Americans will do and plan a course of action. What are your thoughts, Captain?”

“Security will be extreme,” Khalimov said. Pavel Khalimov had been an aide-de-camp and tactician for Yegor Zakharov for many years, and he had learned to trust his opinions and expertise implicitly. “Penetrating even local or private security or law-enforcement patrols will be difficult. We may have more success at European or Asian targets, although they will be substantial as well.”

“Our benefactor said the same,” Zakharov said. He paused for a moment, deep in thought. Then: “Very well, we continue as planned. The last time America was attacked within its own borders, it lashed out mostly at terrorists overseas—the nation’s leaders did not have the stomach to combat terrorists on its own soil. It is too politically incorrect, too unpopular with their constituents. They set up a few security measures here and there, mostly in airports and a few docks and border crossings. But Americans are so enamored of personal freedoms, their precious Bill of Rights, that they would rather allow an entire society to be threatened with death or horrible injury by weapons of mass destruction than inconvenience their citizens with more exhaustive searches and investigation. Stupid.”

“Our mission is proceeding as planned,” Khalimov said. “We anticipated the American government instituting severely increased security measures after our first attack—in fact, we were hoping for it. Most of our forces are already in place and waiting for the American people’s patience to run thin.”

“Exactly. When that happens, we will strike the final blow.” Zakharov fell silent for several long moments, then said, “I want the next attack in the United States to make the one in Houston look like a campfire, Pavel,” he said finally. “We will continue our overseas operations as planned—but it will be nothing compared to what will happen in the United States.”