Devil's Gate

48

Washington, D.C., July 6, 1330 hours

DIRK PITT HAD A FRONT-ROW SEAT in the Situation Room at the Pentagon. Cameron Brinks of the NSA was putting on a show. The President wasn’t there, but his Chief of Staff, military brass from all four branches, and several members of the cabinet were present. As was the Vice President of the United States, Dirk Pitt’s former boss, Admiral James D. Sandecker.

With the bizarre actions in Sierra Leone over the past few days, followed by the threats coming from its President, Brinks had totally embraced the possibility that Sierra Leone was involved in the scientific kidnappings and the creation of some type of energy weapon.

How else could they have the gall to threaten the world and America in particular? After several days of searching with his satellites, Brinks claimed to have identified the location of such a weapon, calling it a clear and present danger.

At the front of the room, on a screen that was just a fraction smaller than some Jumbotrons he’d seen, Pitt studied a satellite feed. It showed an area off the coast of Sierra Leone, a shallow bay ten miles across, home to an oil production zone known as the Quadrangle because of its dimensions and the four evenly spaced platforms. On a wide angle they showed up as four pinpoints of gray. At closer ranges, those points were easily identifiable as huge offshore oil rigs.

Other data was being overlaid on the screen, numbers and codes that Pitt wasn’t familiar with. In some respects he wondered why he was even there. NUMA was peripherally involved in the search, but for the most part any action at this level would be well out of their hands.

With the participants given a few minutes to review the files in front of them, Dirk studied what he’d been given a second time. One thing that caught his attention was the fact that the entire field and the four rigs were owned by the government of Sierra Leone and always had been, unlike all the structures taken just days before in the sweeping nationalization.

Another red flag that stood out was the fact that oilmen the CIA had spoken with insisted there was no oil beneath the shelf where the Sierra Leone government was drilling. It was a boondoggle, they insisted. A waste of the money the IMF was pouring into the country.

Add to that the continued presence of construction barges and constant deliveries of equipment well after the construction of the platforms was completed, and something odd seemed to be going on.

Pitt closed the file in front of him and looked up to see Brinks and Vice President Sandecker walking his way. They stopped and chatted with the Navy’s chief of staff before wandering over to where Pitt sat.

Pitt stood and shook hands with both men.

“I told you your man was off on a wild-goose chase, looking for this mercenary,” Brinks said.

Pitt smiled and his green eyes showed nothing but pure joy, despite a desire to punch Brinks right in the mouth.

“I honestly hope you’re right,” Pitt said. “After all he’s been through, Austin could use a vacation.”

“Well,” Brinks said confidently, “we’re about to give him one.”

As Brinks moved off, Sandecker took a seat next to Pitt.

“Thanks for the invite,” Pitt said, sarcastically. “It’s like a pool party with sharks and alligators.”

“You think I wanted you here?” Sandecker joked. “Brinks dialed you up.”

“Why?”

“Probably wants to gloat.”

“Nothing like a sore winner,” Pitt said.

Sandecker agreed. “I hear you shot him down pretty hard the other day.”

“He was asking for it,” Pitt said.

The VP chuckled and leaned back, focusing on the screen. “I bet he was.”

Pitt appreciated Sandecker’s support. Always had. “You know it’s weird for me to see you without a cigar in your mouth,” Pitt said.

“No smoking in the Situation Room,” Sandecker replied. “Now, pipe down and you might learn something.”

Up front, Cameron Brinks stood and began his presentation. After explaining what Dirk had already discovered in the file, he went on to elaborate.

“I’ll make this as quick as I can,” he said. “We all know the situation in Sierra Leone is spiraling. What we didn’t know until now is whether there was any credence to the threats leveled against us. We now believe, based on information uncovered by various sources, that there is. As odd as it sounds, Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, is now in possession of a weapon of incredible destructive power.”

Brinks walked to the side of the room, conferring for a second with an assistant who seemed to be hooked up to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the satellite data was coming from.

“In the time since we put together the files in front of you,” Brinks said, “we’ve conducted additional satellite passes of the area described in them. The Quadrangle. The video on the screen is a real-time scan.”

Brinks looked down, waited as his assistant tapped a few keys on the computer terminal in front of him, and then raised a remote control device and pointed at the screen. With the click of a button, the colors on the screen changed. False hues illuminated the water, the land, and features that hadn’t been visible in the earlier shot.

“This is an infrared scan of the Quadrangle area,” Brinks said.

Pitt looked on. The area around each oil platform was bathed in a reddish color that elongated with the tide. It had to be a discharge of some kind, one that was raising the water temperature around the rigs and slowly being drawn off by the current. Pollution was his first thought, leaking oil or distillates of some kind, but then he remembered that there was no oil in the region.

“The rigs are pumping heated water,” he said.

Brinks nodded. “Very good, Mr. Pitt. Each one of these platforms is shipping heated water out into the Atlantic. Hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of high-temperature water every day. There can only be one reason for that: whatever they’re doing requires an immense amount of cooling.”

“They’re generating power,” Pitt whispered to Sandecker a few seconds before Brinks confirmed it.

“The question is, why?” Brinks said. “The answer is simple: to use in a massive particle accelerator that they have turned into a weapon.”

Brinks clicked his remote control, and the image changed again, adding purple to the dark blue, gray, and magenta already on the screen. The new iridescent color ran in a thin line, encircling the four oil rigs — which were, in fact, spaced miles apart — in a giant loop. Other thin fingers branched off this loop and stretched out into the Atlantic. One group went to the west and the northwest, another group north and northeast, a third group of these thin purple filaments branched back toward the African continent.

“This loop demarks an underwater structure that was identified through a combination of infrared scans and surface-penetrating radar from an Aurora spy plane. The loop is fifteen miles in diameter,” Brinks said, using a laser pointer to indicate the circle. “And each of these supposed oil rigs is just a facade to throw us off. Beneath their structures are throbbing power plants, each large enough to light a small city.”

“What kind of power plants?” someone asked.

“Gas turbine generators, feeding off a large natural gas pipeline that was built allegedly to bring gas out of the area. We now know the opposite is true.”

“And all that power?” someone else asked.

“Used in the superconducting electromagnets that accelerate the particles,” Brinks said, “and the massive cooling system required to keep the ring at operating temperature.”

Brinks stood back and explained. “By our calculations, this system is generating and using twenty times the energy that CERN uses for its Large Hadron Collider. We can come up with only one explanation for such a power need. This thing is a weapon. It can probably take down satellites over Europe, the Atlantic, and Africa of course. It can threaten shipping in the Atlantic, perhaps as far as a hundred miles out. It can threaten commercial aircraft in a three-hundred-mile radius.”

“The weapon can only fire three hundred miles?” Pitt asked.

“No,” Brinks said. “It can probably do damage at a much farther range, perhaps even tens of thousands of miles, but it fires in a straight line like a laser. It cannot curve around the surface of the earth like a ballistic missile.”

That made sense, but something else didn’t.

“What about the Kinjara Maru?” Pitt asked. “That ship was nowhere near Sierra Leone when it was hit.”

“No,” Brinks admitted. “Probably they have a derivative weapon on that submarine we’re looking for. But that’s a tactical weapon, small potatoes. This thing is strategic and threatens an entire region. We’ll deal with this first, the submarine afterward.”

Brinks turned back to the group. “Our recommendation is that it be taken out in a surgical airstrike before Djemma can use it against someone.”

Silence followed that statement. No one disagreed, not after Djemma Garand’s actions in the days preceding and his threats, however unspecified, against the United States.

“Best recommendation as to method, Mr. Brinks?” Vice President Sandecker asked.

“Advise we take out the rigs, Mr. Vice President,” Brinks said. “That’ll effectively shut off the power. And without power, the particle accelerator is just a big tunnel with a lot of fancy equipment stored inside.”

Though Pitt didn’t like Brinks’s jaunty tone, he calculated the situation similarly. A threat existed, controlled by a leader who appeared to be unstable. An airstrike would create minimal destruction, minimal casualties. The technology would be preserved for study.

Much to Pitt’s dislike, he had to agree with Brinks’s assessment.

“I’ll relay your recommendation to the President,” Sandecker said, then stood.

Meetings like this didn’t often last long. And even if it was going to continue, the VP had seen enough.

But before he could leave, something odd happened to the screen at the front of the room. The colors shifted for a second and then bled, like something was interfering with the signal.

All eyes focused on it.

Brinks looked to his assistant. “What’s going on?”

The assistant was tapping away at a laptop. He looked up, shaking his head.

A second later a flare of white light crossed the screen and then everything went dark. Static followed and then a blank screen. Text in the bottom right-hand corner indicated complete signal loss.

Brinks looked embarrassed. “Get on the horn and find out what happened to the feed.”

“The line’s clean,” the assistant said. “The signal’s coming through fine. It’s just not carrying any data.”

Pitt had been watching something odd on the screen right before it flared. He doubted anyone else had noticed as the VP was leaving. When Sandecker stood, everyone else stood, Pitt as well, but he’d never taken his eyes off the screen.

That allowed him to see a number indicating heat output from the oil platforms suddenly rising. It had climbed rapidly, like an odometer rolling over. A new area of red and magenta had appeared over one of the angled filaments. It had been visible for only a second, but Pitt was fairly certain he knew what it was.

Somewhere in Fort Meade the techs probably knew too; they just were too stunned to say so until they’d checked every other possibility.

“The problem’s not the computer,” Pitt announced. “It’s your satellite.”

All eyes turned to him.

“Really?” Brinks said. “And when did you become an expert in remote imaging diagnostics?”

“I’m not,” Pitt said. “But play the last five seconds back. You’ll see an energy spike right before the image flared. They fried your satellite, Brinks. It’s gone.”

Brinks looked over at his assistant. “We’re trying to reestablish a link,” he said.

“Forget it,” Pitt told him. “You’re calling up a dead bird.”

“Switch to Keyhole Bravo,” Brinks said, referencing the backup satellite that was orbiting at a different angle and higher altitude.

Brinks’s assistant finished his last desperate act of tapping and looked up. There was nothing to say.

“Two satellites gone,” Sandecker said. “That’s a damn act of war.”

Everyone in the room grew more somber at that realization.

“I figured you’d be happy,” Pitt said to Brinks. “This proves your theory. Djemma Garand is dangerous, his weapon is operational, and he’s not afraid to use it. Even I agree with you now. He has to be taken out.”