Six Seconds

53

East of Great Falls, Montana

A sudden burst of distant light near the ground flashed in Jim Yancy’s periphery.

What the hell?

Must be a lightning strike, the rancher thought before the firecracker pop rolled across the plain to him.

No, couldn’t be lightning. Not with this clear blue sky.

Yancy shrugged it off, edged his ATV forward and went back to repairing fencing along his property near Malmstrom Air Force Base. Likely military people doing some live fire exercise, or detonating old shells. But he hadn’t seen them do any of that for years.

The more Yancy thought about it, the more it made him curious. He squinted under his ball cap toward the flash and watched an SUV driving from it, kicking up dust clouds.

After it vanished, Yancy left his fence and headed to the site. It was odd. Nothing out there but a whole lot of nothing. Yancy had lived in these parts most of his life and that SUV was no military vehicle.

He had a bad feeling about this.

He came upon a tattered rag the size of a washcloth. Red, white and blue, like Old Glory. He saw a salt lick, a fragment of a tin bucket, blood-soaked shortgrass crowned with the head of a white-tailed deer.

Its dead eye locked in open horror on Yancy.

“Gee-Zuss-H!”

Yancy called the Cascade County Sheriff.

The deputy and Malmstrom military personnel arrived first. Then came the Air National Guard fire fighters, Malmstrom’s EOD technicians, Montana Highway Patrol and the FBI.

It was clear that something had exploded, but after investigating they were puzzled as to just what it was. The components remained a mystery. More calls were made through the chain of command to Washington, D.C., and by that afternoon Tony Takayasu’s team had arrived from Maryland.

They’d barely had time to recover from their call to Pysht and had only begun further analysis of the sub stance in the Nigerian beer bottles, when they were deployed to Malmstrom in Montana.

During the flight, Takayasu, Karen Dyer and the others studied all the e-mailed Montana reports and photos. With the fragments of a salt lick, a bucket, the incident seemed premeditated, planned.

Like a test.

Takayasu’s unit also kept in mind Montana’s history of domestic acts, such as the Unabomber and the armed antigovernment extremists who forced a standoff with the FBI near Jordan.

After their jet landed at Malmstrom they were taken to the site in a school bus. On the way, they were briefed by FBI Special Agent David Groller, an intense man who let it be known he’d lost friends in the towers.

“We know this can’t be attributed to kids from the uni versity playing a prank,” Groller said. “And we don’t think the animals stepped on any unexploded devices, or that someone local is testing a new method for culling a herd.”

Groller underscored the fact Malmstrom controlled missiles with nuclear warheads.

“And,” he continued, “the pope is due to arrive in Montana within some seventy-two hours, so the heat’s on us to identify the substance ASAP, assess whether or not it is a threat, who’s the target, who’s behind it, then hunt the mothers down.”

Takayasu’s elite team suited up and worked flat out.

As they did in Pysht, they collected samples, analyzed residue, tested the air, the soil, measured and took readings and photographs.

Analysis showed that recovered pieces of fabric seemed to originate from a U.S. flag. The material seemed to be a cotton weave common in East Africa. So maybe a Third World sweatshop had manufactured the flag.

Nothing unusual.

However, the residue taken from the parts of the dis membered deer exhibited troubling characteristics as the team conducted a number of examinations.

Karen Dyer applied an advance test involving a mi croscopic silica film treated with nitrogen-containing macrocyclic molecules known as porphyrins. Then she scoped it with fluorescent light. Sensors picked up minute traces of triacetone triperoxide that seemed to have been mixed with pentaerythritol tetranitrate. All in visible to the naked eye.

“What do you think, Tony?”

“I don’t know how this was done.” Takayasu pointed to his laptop screen. “Look at these animal parts. Appears to have been an adult and two young deer. Look at the average weight for the species common here.”

“I know.”

“Whatever exploded was something vastly more powerful in proportion to its volume. Thirty, forty times, maybe more. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“But what’s the vehicle for delivery? We’ve found no components.”

“I don’t know. It’s like it doesn’t exist.”

Takayasu conducted one last analysis before packing up-the early results unnerved him.

“Karen, once again, we’ve got to get back to the lab for more testing, to break this down.”

“I’ll alert our pilots.”