Scarecrow Returns

CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA 2230 HOURS (1130 HOURS AT DRAGON)

DAVE FAIRFAX ushered Marianne Retter into his apartment in Crystal City and slammed the door shut behind them, breathless.

They’d come straight here by train from the Pentagon, where they had just escaped from a group of men posing as a VIP transport team. Dave’s place in Crystal City was pretty close to the Pentagon, just one Metro stop and a reasonable walk away.

“Okay, you are now officially a very important person,” Dave gasped. “That was just brazen. A straight-out kidnapping at the Pentagon’s front doors.”

“Who were those guys?” Marianne asked.

“Don’t know,” Dave said. “But they knew who you were and where you were going and they didn’t want you to get there. We gotta hurry. If they can identify me, we can’t stay here for long. But if we’re gonna keep investigating this matter, I need a computer with some serious software on it . . .”

Dave unlocked a drawer and pulled his home laptop from it. He flipped the computer open, threw on an earpiece and started typing quickly.

“They didn’t look foreign,” Retter said to herself, her voice analytical. “And their accents were flawless; outfits, too. Could they have been American? And while brazen, sure, they made a small mistake that most people wouldn’t have picked up. But it was a mistake of speed—they could fake everything else, ID tags, cars, but they had to get to me before they could source a car with the right wheels, which means the decision to snatch me was made in a hurry—”

“Wait.” Dave held up a hand, touched his earpiece. “I’m tapping into encrypted radio airspace around D.C.—military, intelligence and police channels—using our names as keywords. Something like this goes wrong, people start calling their superiors over cell phones and radios . . .”

Text scrolled out on his screen.

“Oh, shit . . .” Dave said.

“What?” Retter leaned forward.

Dave nodded at the text scrolling out on the screen:

TRACK V–DATA SYSTEM

ECHELON SUBSYSTEM REGION: E-4 WASHINGTON D.C. AND SURROUNDS

FREQUENCY RANGE: 462.741–464.85 MHZ

KEYWORDS: RETTER, MARIANNE, FAIRFAX, DAVID

KEYWORDS FOUND.

FROM USER: A9 (CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY)

VOICE 1: THE RETTER SNATCH AT THE PENTAGON WAS BLOWN. WHAT

HAPPENED?

VOICE 2: SHE IDENTIFIED US AND GOT AWAY WITH SOME GUY.

VOICE 3: WE HAVE HIS NAME. DAVID FAIRFAX. HE’S ALSO DIA. GOT A HOME

ADDRESS IN CRYSTAL CITY.

VOICE 1: GET THERE NOW.

Dave looked at Marianne. “And there you have it. You almost just got kidnapped by the CIA and we have to run right now.”

They fled from Dave’s apartment, taking his laptop with them, and dashed to a nearby mall that stayed open till midnight. There they hid in a bookstore, in the coffee shop by the magazine racks, with a good view of the entrance.

“Okay,” Dave said. “I think it’s time for some more information sharing between you and me.”

“That assumes I can trust you,” Retter said.

“Navy Cross . . .” Dave said. “On the run, too.”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

Dave put his laptop on the table and typed as he spoke. “Okay, me first, here’s what I know: my Marine contact is up in the Arctic Circle. He said he was about to go into battle and asked me to look up two things for him: the Army of Thieves and Dragon Island, an old and very nasty ex-Soviet base up in the Arctic.

“My investigations into the Army of Thieves led me to you. My investigations into Dragon Island led me to this, which was why I was coming to see you. This is a list of American military and intelligence organizations who have made mention of or shown some interest in Dragon Island over the last thirty years.”

Retter’s eyes went wide when she saw the screen. “That’s the JCIDD. It’s only accessible to the Joint Chiefs and the highest-ranking—”

“Did I mention that I’m a code-cracker?”

“Oh, right.”

“Any names you recognize?” he asked.

She scanned the list on Dave’s screen:

AGENCY

DOC TYPE

SUMMARY

AUTHOR

YEAR

USN

SOVIET SUB REPAIR BASES

List of Soviet Navy ballistic-missile submarine repair facilities

Draper, A

1979–present

NWS

MACRO WEATHER SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Analysis of jet stream wind patterns

Corbett, L

1982

CIA

POSSIBLE LOCATIONS

Geographical options for Operation “Dragonslayer”

Calderon, M

1984

CIA

SOVIET CHEM & BIO WEAPONS DVLPT SITES

List of known Soviet chemical and biological weapons development sites and facilities

Dockrill, W

1986

USAF

HIGH-VALUE TARGET LIST (USSR)

List of first-strike targets in the USSR in the event of a major conflict

Holman, G

1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991

NRO/USAF

SATELLITE LOCATION LIST

Interagency swap of GPS data concerning Russian bases

Gaunt, K

2001 (updated 2006)

ARMY

SOVIET CHEMICAL & BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS SURVEY

List of known chemical and biological weapons kept by USSR/Russian Special Weapons Directorate

Gamble, N

1980–1991; 1992–present

Retter bit her lip as she peered at the list.

“The usual suspects,” she said, “Army, Air Force, Navy, CIA, even the National Weather Service analyzing the jet stream. But if you look closely at it, this gives you a sort of rough history of Dragon Island.”

“How so?” Dave asked.

“Well, look. It starts with Dragon coming to the U.S. Navy’s attention in 1979 as a run-of-the-mill northern repair facility for the Soviet ballistic-missile fleet. Then the Weather Service found it, due to its position under the Arctic jet stream. But then it gets interesting.

“Now, you told me earlier that the weapons base on Dragon was built in 1985. Look here: in 1986, Dragon appeared immediately on a CIA list of Soviet chemical and biological weapons sites and the Air Force’s list of high-value Soviet targets. It actually stayed on that second list until the USSR’s fall in 1992, but after that, it fell off it, no longer a high-value site. The other documents look like standard crap, like the 1984 CIA report titled POSSIBLE LOCATIONS by—wait a goddamn second—by ‘Calderon, M.’”

“What?” Dave asked. “Who’s that?”

“Calderon, M., is Marius Calderon,” Retter said thoughtfully. “No way . . . this is one of his schemes. Fuck me, this could be the link you’re looking for, Mr. Fairfax.”

“What? Why? You know this guy?”

“Do I ever. I’ve come across his name a few times in my research into the Army of Thieves. This could explain a lot.”

Now it was Dave who leaned forward. “So who is he and why is he writing about Dragon Island in 1984, a year before the base there was even built?”

A siren wailed outside the store, and they both spun, but it was just an ambulance, speeding away. They exhaled.

“Marius Calderon,” Retter said, “is a hotshot at the CIA, been there since 1980 when they recruited him straight out of Army Ranger training.

“His original area of expertise was China: Calderon was assigned to observe and analyze China following its program of economic reforms that had commenced in 1978. But he’s served in almost every corner of the CIA since: from the Activity to the Special-Ops division. Importantly for our purposes, in the late 1980s, he was an instructor at the School of the Americas, that military training academy I was telling you about that the U.S. Army ran out of Fort Benning at which . . .”

“. . . at which several Chilean members of the Army of Thieves learned how to be really bad dudes,” Dave said.

“Right. The only reason I found out about this Calderon guy was when I was looking into those twelve Chilean officers broken out of the Valparaiso prison. They all attended the School of the Americas at the time Calderon was a teacher there. All twelve were his students.”

“No shit . . .”

“So I looked up his record,” Retter said. “In addition to all that other stuff, Calderon has spent the bulk of his career in the Agency’s psychological warfare division. He’s an expert in, and I quote from his file: ‘the retrieval of mission-critical information from unwilling enemy combatants through unrestrained psychological interrogation.’”

“Torture,” Dave said.

“Psychological torture. For the last twenty-odd years, Marius Calderon has been the CIA’s foremost expert in psy-ops and non-invasive torture, and these days non-invasive torture is back in fashion. Calderon’s methods are standard practice at Gitmo and other rendition sites.

“His theory is that you can get a man to do anything or reveal anything by ruthlessly attacking his mind.

“It’s said that in Afghanistan in 2005 he ‘turned’ three captured Taliban troops using subliminal methods—he stapled their eyes open and bombarded them for six days straight with videos of violence, sadism, live amputations and bestiality, while beating them relentlessly and overwhelming them with loud music and the cries of other people being tortured. Those Taliban troops were then released and sent back to their villages, where they became ticking psychological time-bombs, ready to explode when Calderon gave the word. After the CIA broadcast a certain radio message, all three of them went on shooting rampages in their home villages, killing over thirty people before turning their guns on themselves.”

“Jesus.”

“Back in the early 1980s, Calderon was the wunderkind of the CIA, the boy genius. In 1983, at the age of 27, he conceived and coordinated the little-known Able Archer 83 exercise—a simulation of a NATO nuclear attack on the USSR that involved the participation of real heads of state. The Soviets, as Calderon had predicted they would, thought it was real and readied their nuclear arsenal . . . while every American military and intelligence agency observed them closely. For the rest of the 1980s, we knew all the Soviets’ moves before they did. Reagan loved it. He gave Calderon the Intelligence Medal for it.

“Impressed by his work on Able Archer 83, the CIA used Calderon for all sorts of geopolitical analyses—Russia, China, Central and South America. But most of all, they used him as a predictor, an analyst of enemy intent, a forecaster of how America’s enemies would react in certain scenarios, just like in Able Archer.

“Calderon was such a good reader of people and their motivations, their emotions and their intentions, that he was often able to predict what they would do. For instance, Calderon predicted every one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s internal strategems, from his rise to General Secretary of the Politburo in 1985 to glasnost and perestroika. Any time Reagan met Gorbachev, the President was briefed personally by Calderon beforehand. Reagan would say it was like seeing all of Gorbachev’s cards before playing poker with him.

“I actually found one old report that Calderon wrote about China back in 1982, with some predictions he made back then.”

Retter still had her briefcase with her, filled with the files and notes she’d been taking to the White House. She opened it, pulled out a printed document and handed it to Dave.

It was titled:

THE COMING RISE OF CHINA

AND THE ENSUING FALL OF AMERICA

ANALYSIS BY

MARIUS CALDERON

JULY 2, 1982

“Nice title,” Dave said. “Very alarmist.”

Retter said, “The Communist Party called China’s economic reforms ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ but we would just call it free-market capitalism with a brutal government. The reforms began in 1978 and were slow to take hold. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and 2000s that China’s economy became the powerhouse we know it to be today. But in 1982, it was still a dump, an agrarian economy with collective farms and useless state-owned industries. Nobody took China seriously back then . . . except Marius Calderon. Read some of the highlighted paragraphs and remember that Calderon wrote them back in 1982.”

Dave scanned the document, glancing at the paragraphs Retter had marked with highlighter. They included:

THE 21ST–CENTURY SUPERPOWER: CHINA

Make no mistake, the Communist Party’s sweeping economic reforms will create a new China, a China that by the year 2010 will challenge America as the dominant player in the world’s economy.

As China’s economy opens and expands, its industry will devour the globe’s supplies of iron ore and aluminum, and its middle class will grow wealthier. A billion Chinese consumers will demand TVs, cars, refrigerators, plus all the other consumer goods that Americans have taken for granted since the 1950s, our golden age.

America is in decline. We don’t manufacture anything anymore. The dream years from 1945 to 1970 (when we had no industrial competition from the countries we defeated in the Second World War, Germany and Japan) are over. Now in the 1980s, both Germany and Japan build better cars, white goods and consumer electronics than we do. American blue-collar workers can’t compete with cheap labor from countries like Japan and Taiwan.

But all this is nothing compared to the industrial behemoth that China will become.

It was industrial might that allowed the North to win the Civil War; it was industrial might that allowed America to prevail on two fronts in the Second World War. China’s industrial might is of a scale not seen before on this planet. And its recent economic reforms are designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to rouse the sleeping dragon and awaken that industrial might.

If implemented correctly, I foresee China’s economy growing at double-digit annual rates every year for much of the 1990s and 2000s—

“Jesus,” Dave said. “This guy foresaw China’s double-digit growth back in 1982.”

“Read on,” Retter said.

Dave found the next highlighted passage:

FORESEEABLE CONSEQUENCES OF THE RISE OF CHINA

The first casualty of the rise of China will be the average American’s standard of living. Our dollar will become worthless alongside the Chinese yuan (which the Chinese will be reluctant to float). Americans will not be able to travel, while the Chinese will grow ever richer. Large deficits will follow and our government will start borrowing money from the Chinese.

American unemployment will reach unsustainable levels as low-skilled work (especially factory and manufacturing labor) will be done by cheaper workers in China. And with economic strength goes political strength. As China grows wealthier, it will give aid to poorer countries and ultimately develop greater global influence than the United States—

Dave looked up from the document. “This guy was good.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Retter said. “He goes on to predict that China will bid for and win the Olympic Games in the first decade of the 21st century and use the Games to showcase China to the world.”

“Okay. So where is he now?” Dave asked.

Retter raised her palms. “I asked around at both DIA and CIA, but either no one knows or they aren’t telling. He’s still with the Agency. He did some deep black stuff in its special forces paramilitary unit in 2002—did you know that the Agency owns and operates three Sturgeon-class submarines for clandestine insertions? Then he did some time at U.S. ‘rendition stations’ in Egypt and Turkey from 2003 to 2004. As for where he’s been stationed for the last year or so, and what he’s been doing, no one’s saying.”

“You think Calderon is connected with the Army of Thieves?” Dave asked.

“He personally trained the twelve Chileans who were sprung from Valparaiso prison. They know him and they know his methods; they’d be a perfect officer corps for a renegade army. And there’s something else: I mentioned that Calderon worked at the CIA’s rendition stations in Egypt and Turkey—nasty remote compounds where we tortured prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq. But at the rendition center in Egypt, the CIA helped certain African governments extract information from their captured enemies, and one of our customers was the rather unpleasant government of Sudan that was later brought down.”

Dave said, “The second breakout was of a hundred Sudanese soldiers from a U.N. prison in the Sudan. Wait. Are you saying that this Calderon guy, a CIA agent, put together the Army of Thieves? Got the officers from Chile and the infantry from the Sudan?”

“Yes. I have another theory, too, but you’ll think it’s nuts.”

“Try me.”

Retter hesitated. “I can’t prove it but . . . well . . .” She took a quick breath. “The leader of the Army of Thieves is smart, bold and totally brazen, yet he always covers his face. Why would you do that if you were an anarchist? I think he does it because he doesn’t want anyone to recognize him. He needs to keep his identity a secret. I think it’s entirely possible that Marius Calderon, a top CIA agent, is the leader of the Army of Thieves.”

“But why would this Calderon guy want to create a rogue army?” Dave said.

“That, Mr. Fairfax, is not the question. Calderon is old-school CIA. The real question is: why would the CIA want to create a rogue army?”

“Maybe asking that question is the reason why they just tried to abduct you outside the Pentagon.”

“Indeed.” Retter nodded at the screen. “So what’s this document, then, this one Calderon wrote about Dragon Island in 1984 called ‘Possible Locations: Geographical Options for Operation Dragonslayer’? I haven’t seen it.” She gave Dave a look. “I didn’t have the clearance. What’s ‘Operation Dragonslayer’?”

“Let’s find out.” Dave clicked on it and typed in a few very illegal passwords.

A warning screen appeared, declaring the document you are about to open is location protected.

“What’s that mean?” Retter said.

“It means, once we open it, this computer and its location will be digitally tagged by the owner of the document. They’ll know we opened it and they’ll know where from. If we want to read this, we have to read it fast and then move. You still game?”

“I want to know. You?”

“Hell, yeah,” Dave said. He clicked open document.

A new window opened. Immediately, a blinking time-coded box appeared in the top-right corner of the screen, warning: document opening recorded. sending user identification.

Dave ignored it. He scanned the document quickly.

It was a PDF of an old typewritten document, date-stamped August 1984 and headed:

OPERATION “DRAGONSLAYER”

ANALYSIS AND OPERATION CONCEPT BY

MARIUS CALDERON

AUGUST 1, 1984

It was short, just three pages long.

And in the café of that bookstore in suburban Virginia, with their computer’s digital signature being sent who-knew-where, Dave Fairfax and Marianne Retter read it.

When they were done, they both looked at each other in horror.

“Oh, fuck . . .” Dave breathed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. No wonder the CIA tried to snatch you. We are in so much trouble.”

Dave went to switch off his laptop’s Wi-Fi link—he could keep the computer, he could just never link it to the Internet again, otherwise they could keep following him from place to place.

But he stopped himself short.

There was one more thing he needed to do.

So he did it: he sent the document he had just read off into cyberspace.

“Cut the connection, flyboy. We have to go,” Retter said.

Dave cut it and they bolted from the bookstore.