Temple

FOURTH MACHINATION

Tuesday, January 5, 0930 hours

Special Agent JohnPaul Demonaco walked slowly down the white-lit corridor, careful not to step on the bodybags.

It was 9:30 in the morning, January 5, and Demonaco had just arrived at 3701 North Fairfax Drive in response to an order from the Director of the FBI himself.

Like the rest of the world, Demonaco knew nothing of the breakin at DARPA headquarters the day before. All he knew was that the Director had received a phone call at 3:30 that morning from a four-star admiral standing in the Oval Office asking for him to send his best domestic antiterrorist man down to Fairfax Drive as soon as humanly possible.

His best man was JohnPaul Demonaco.

‘J.P.’ Demonaco was fifty-two years old, divorced, and a little loose around the waistline. He had thinning brown hair and wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. His rumpled grey polyester suit had been bought from J.C. Penney for a hundred dollars in 1994, while the Versace tie that he wore with it had been bought for three hundred dollars only last year. It had been a birthday gift from his youngest daughter-apparently it was trendy.

Despite his dress sense, Demonaco was Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s AntiTerrorist Unit (Domestic), a position he had occupied for four years now, principally because he knew more about American terrorism than anybody else alive.

Walking down the white-lit hallway, Demonaco saw another bodybag lying on the floor in front of him. A star of blood smeared the wall above it. He added the bag to his tally. That made ten already.

What on earth had happened here?

He turned a corner and immediately saw a small crowd of people standing at the entrance to a laboratory at the end of the corridor.

Most of the members of the crowd, he saw, were dressed in perfectly starched, dark blue U.S. Navy uniforms.

A twenty-something lieutenant met him halfway down the corridor.

‘Special Agent Demonaco?’

Demonaco flashed his ID in response.

‘This way please. Commander Mitchell is expecting you.’

The young lieutenant led him into the laboratory. As he entered the lab, Demonaco silently took in the wall-mounted security cameras, the thick hydraulic doors, the alpha-numeric locks.

Jesus, it was a goddamn vault.

‘Special Agent Demonaco?’ a voice said from behind him. Demonaco turned to see a handsome young officer standing before him. The man was about thirty-six years old, tall, with blue eyes and short sandy-blond hair—a Navy poster boy. And for some reason that Demonaco couldn’t quite pin down, he looked oddly familiar.

‘Yeah, I’m Demonaco.’

‘Commander Tom Mitchell. Naval Criminal Investigative Service.’

NCIS, Demonaco thought. Interesting.

When he had arrived at Fairfax Drive, Demonaco had barely even noticed the Navy servicemen guarding the entrance to the building. It wasn’t unusual in the DC area to have certain federal buildings guarded by specific branches of the armed forces. For example, Fort Meade, the headquarters of the NSA, was actually an Army compound. The White House, on the other hand, was guarded by members of the United States Marine Corps. It would have come as no surprise to Demonaco to learn that DARPA was protected by the U.S. Navy. Which would have explained all the Navy suits here now.

But no. If the NCIS was here, that meant something else entirely.

Something that went beyond merely failing to protect a federal building. Something internal…

‘I don’t know if you remember me,” Mitchell said, “but I took your seminar at Quantico about six months ago. “The Second Amendment and the Rise of the Militia Groups”.’

So that was where he had seen Mitchell before.

Every three months, Demonaco gave a seminar at Quantico on domestic terrorist organisations in the United States.

In his lectures, he basically outlined the make-up, methods and philosophies of the more organised militia groups in the country—groups like the Patriots, the White Aryan Resistance or the Republican Army of Texas.

After the Oklahoma City bombing and the bloody siege at the Coltex nuclear weapons facility in Amarillo, Texas, Demonaco’s seminars had been in high demand. Especially among the armed forces, since their bases—and the buildings they protected—were often the targets of domestic terrorist acts.

‘What can I do for you, Commander Mitchell?’ Demonaco said.

‘Well, first of all, as you will no doubt appreciate, everything you see or hear in this room is strictly classifi—’

‘What is it you want me to do?’ Demonaco was famous for his inability to put up with bullshit.

Mitchell took a deep breath. ‘As you can see, we had something of an… incident.., here yesterday morning. Seventeen security staff killed and a weapon of immense importance stolen. We have reason to believe that a domestic terrorist organisation was involved, which is why you were called in—’

‘Is that him? Is that him?’ a rough-sounding voice said from somewhere nearby.

Demonaco turned and saw a severe-looking captain with a grey moustache and a matching grey crew-cut striding quickly toward him and Commander Mitchell.

The captain glared at Mitchell. ‘I told you this was a mistake, Tom. This is an internal matter. We don’t need to involve the FBI in this.’

‘Special Agent Demonaco,’ Mitchell said, ‘this is Captain Vernon Aaronson. Captain Aaronson has overall responsibility for this investigation—’

‘But Commander Mitchell here, it seems, has the ear of those who would like to see this puzzle solved more slowly than it has to be,’

Aaronson quipped.

Demonaco judged Vernon Aaronson to be a couple of years older—and at least a decade more bitter—than his subordinate, Commander Mitchell.

‘I had no choice, sir,’ Mitchell said. ‘The President insisted—’

‘The President insisted…’ Aaronson snorted.

‘He didn’t want to see a repeat of the Baltimore freeway incident.’

Ah, Demonaco thought. So that was it.

On Christmas Day 1997, an unmarked DARPA transport truck travelling from New York to Virginia was hijacked as it travelled along the Baltimore beltway. Stolen from the truck were sixteen J-7 jet packs and forty-eight prototype explosive charges—small chrome-and-plastic tubes that looked like glass laboratory vials.

But these were no ordinary explosive charges. Officially, they were called M-22 isotopic charges, but around DARPA they were known as ‘Pocket Dynamos’.

Put simply, the Pocket Dynamo was an evolutionary step forward in high-temperature liquid chemical technology. The result of thirteen years’ concerted labour by the United States Army and DARPA’s Advanced Ordnance Division, the M-22 utilised laboratory-created isotopes of the element chlorine to deliver a concentrated blast wave of such savage intensity that it literally vaporised anything within a two hundred-yard radius of the detonation point.

It was designed for use by small incursionary units on sabotage or search-and-destroy missions—where the mission objective was to leave absolutely nothing behind. The isotopic explosion of an M-22 charge was second only in intensity to a thermonuclear blast, but without the attendant radioactive aftereffects.

What Demonaco also knew about the Baltimore freeway incident, however, was that the Army had handled the investigation into the theft themselves.

Two days after the daring robbery, the Army investigators received a tip-off regarding the location of the stolen weapons and without so much as consulting with the FBI or the CIA, a squad of Green Berets was ordered to storm the headquarters of an underground militia group in northern Idaho. Ten people were killed, twelve were wounded. It turned out to be the wrong group. In fact, more than that, it turned out to be one of the more benign paramilitary groups around, more like a gun club than a terrorist cell. No isotopic explosives were found on their premises. The ACLU and the NRA had had a field day.

The jet packs and the M-22s were never recovered.

Quite obviously Demonaco thought, the President didn’t want another such embarrassment here. Which was why he had been called in.

‘So what is it you want me to look at?’ he said.

‘This,’ Mitchell said, pulling something from his pocket and handing it to Demonaco.

It was a clear plastic evidence bag.

In it was a bloodstained bullet.

Demonaco sat down at a nearby table to examine the bloodsmeared bullet.

‘Where was this taken from, one of the security personnel?’

‘No,’ Mitchell said. ‘The driver of the delivery van they used to get in. He was the only one they killed with a pistol.’

Captain Aaronson added, ‘After they used him to get past the garage guards, they popped him in the head at pointblank range.’

‘A calling card,’ Demonaco said.

“Uh-huh.’

‘Looks like a tungsten core…’ Demonaco said, perusing the spent projectile.

‘That’s what we thought, too,’ Aaronson said. ‘And as far as we know, only one terrorist organisation in the United States is known to use tungsten-based ammunition. The Oklahoma Freedom Fighters.’

Demonaco didn’t look up from the bullet in his hands.

‘That’s true, but the Freedom Fighters—’

‘—are known to operate like this,’ Aaronson cut in. ‘Special forces-type entry, double-taps to their victims’ heads, the theft of cutting-edge military technology.’

‘It would appear that you’ve been to one of my seminars, too, Captain Aaronson,’ Demonaco said.

‘Yes, I have,’ Aaronson said, ‘but I also consider myself to be a specialist in this field, too. I’ve studied these groups extensively as part of ongoing Naval security updates. We have to keep an eye on these people, too, you know.’

‘Then you’d know that the Freedom Fighters are in the middle of a turf war with the Texans,’ Demonaco said.

Aaronson bit his lip, frowned. He obviously hadn’t known that. He glared at Demonaco, stung by the veiled retort.

Demonaco looked up at the two Naval officers through his horn-rimmed glasses. There was something they weren’t telling him.

‘Gentlemen. What happened here?’

Aaronson and Mitchell exchanged a look.

‘What do you mean?’ Mitchell asked.

‘I can’t help you if I don’t know the full story of what happened here.

Like, for starters, what it was that was stolen.’

Aaronson grimaced. Then he said, ‘They were after a device called the Supernova. They knew where it was and how to get it. They knew all the codes and had all the cardkeys. They moved with precision and speed, like a well-oiled commando unit.’

Demonaco said, ‘The Freedom Fighters’ strike team is good but it isn’t big enough to take down a place this size.

It’s too small, maybe two or three men at the most. That’s why they only attack soft targets—-computer labs, low-level government offices—places from which they can steal technical data like electrical schematics or satellite overpass times. But most importantly, they only attack sites that are lightly guarded. Not fortresses like this. They’re first and foremost techno-nuts, not a full-frontal assault squad.’

‘But they are the only group known to use tungsten-based ammunition,’ Aaronson said.

‘That’s true.’

‘So maybe they’ve stepped up their operations,’ Aaronson said smugly. ‘Maybe they’re trying to make the leap into the big leagues.’

‘Possible.’

‘It’s possible,’ Aaronson snorted. ‘Special Agent Demonaco, perhaps I haven’t made something clean The device that was stolen from this facility is of the utmost importance to the future defence of the United States. In the wrong hands, its use could be catastrophic. Now, I have SEAL teams standing by right now to take out three suspected Freedom Fighter locations. But my bosses need to know that this is clean—they don’t want another Baltimore.

All we need from you is an acknowledgment that this robbery could only have been done by them.’

‘Well…’ Demonaco began.

It all depended on the tungsten bullets, really. But for some reason that Demonaco couldn’t quite put his finger on, their use here troubled him…

‘Agent Demonaco,’ Aaronson said, ‘let me make this simpler. To the best of your knowledge, is there any paramilitary group in the United States other than the Oklahoma Freedom Fighters that uses tungsten-cored ammunition?’

‘No,’ Demonaco said.

‘Good. Thank you.’

And with that, Aaronson gave Demonaco and Mitchell a withering glare and stalked away to a nearby telephone where he dialled a short number and said, ‘This is Aaronson. Assault operations are go.

Repeat. Assault operations are go. Take the bastards down.’

Daylight came to the rainforest.

Race awoke to find himself propped up against the wall of the ATV. His head ached and his clothes were still damp.

The sliding side door of the ATV lay open. He heard voices outside.

‘—what are you doing here?’

‘—my name is Marc Graf, and I am a lieutenant in the Fallschirmjger—’

Race got up and went outside.

It was morning and a low fog had descended upon the village. The ATV was now parked in the centre of the main street, and as he stepped out of the big armoured vehicle, it took him a moment to adjust his eyes to the wall of grey all around him. Slowly, however, the main street of Vilcafor began to take shape.

Race froze.

The street was completely deserted.

All the bodies from the previous night’s slaughter were gone. Indeed all that remained in their place were large pools of mud and water, peppered by the falling rain.

The cats, he saw, were also gone.

He saw Nash, Lauren and Copeland standing off to his left, over by the citadel. With them stood the six Green Berets and Gaby Lopez.

Before them, however, stood five other people.

Four men and one woman.

The surviving Germans, he guessed.

Race also noticed that only two of the Germans wore military fatigues—soldiers. All the others wore civilian clothing, including two—a man and a woman—who looked like undercover cops. All of them had been disarmed.

Sergeant Van Lewen caught sight of Race, came over ‘How’s the head?’ he said.

‘Awful,’ Race said. ‘What’s happening here?’

Van Lewen indicated the five Germans. ‘They’re the only ones who survived the night. Two of them jumped inside the ATV during the battle and uncuffed us. We managed to pick up the other three just before we got you at the jetty.’

Race nodded.

Then he turned suddenly to face his bodyguard. ‘Say, I have a question for you.’

‘Yes?’

‘How did you know about that rubber button inside the Humvee. The one that started it after the Germans had shut it down?’

Van Lewen smiled at him. ‘If I tell you I’ll have to kill you.’

‘Fine, go ahead.’

Van Lewen grinned at that. Then he said, ‘It’s fairly standard practice in armed forces around the world to use field vehicles like Humvees and ATVs as portable prisons. You lock the prisoners in the car and then you disable it.

‘The United States, however, is the leading supplier of field vehicles worldwide. Humvees, for example, are made by the AM General Company in South Bend, Indiana.

‘The thing is—and this is something that not everyone knows—all American-made field vehicles are fitted with a safety release button, a button that allows the vehicle to be restarted in the event that it is shut down. The theory is that no U.S. vehicle will ever be used as a prison to hold U.S. personnel. Hence, only U.S. military personnel are informed of the whereabouts of those safety buttons. It’s a trapdoor, known only to American soldiers.’

With that, Van Lewen smiled and headed off to join the others over by the citadel. Race hurried after him.

He and Van Lewen joined the others at the citadel.

They arrived there to find Frank Nash interrogating one of the disarmed German commandos—the man Race had heard identify himself as Marc Graf, a lieutenant in the Fallschirmjiger.

‘So are you here for the idol too?’ Nash demanded.

Graf shook his head.

“I do not know the details,’ he said in English. ‘I am only a lieutenant, I do not have clearance to know the full extent of the mission.’

He nodded with his chin at one of the other Germans, the burly-looking man wearing jeans and a holster. ‘I think it would be better if you asked my associate here, Mr. Karl Schroeder. Mr. Schroeder is a special agent with the Bundes Kriminal Amt. The Bundeswehr is working in conjunction with the BKA on this mission.’

‘The BKA?’ Nash said, perplexed.

Race knew what he was thinking.

The Bundes Kriminal Amt was the German equivalent of the FBI. Its reputation was legendary. It was often said to be the finest federal investigative bureau in the world. But still, it” was essentially a police force, which was why Nash was confused. It had no reason to be in Peru looking for an idol.

‘What does the BKA want with a lost Incan idol?’ he asked.

Schroeder paused a moment, as if he were contemplating just how much he should reveal to Nash. And then he sighed—like it would matter now after the previous night’s slaughter.

‘It is not what you think,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We do not want the idol to make a weapon,’ Schroeder said simply. ‘In fact, contrary to what you probably believe, my country does not even possess a Supernova.’

‘Then what do you want the idol for?’

‘What we want it for is simple,’ Schroeder said. ‘We want to get it before somebody else does.’

‘Who?’ Nash said.

‘The same people who were responsible for the massacre of those monks in the Pyrenees,’ Schroeder said. ‘The same people who were responsible for the kidnap and murder of the academic Albert Mueller after he published that article about the meteor crater in Peru late last year.’

‘So who are they?’

‘A terrorist organisation who call themselves the Schutz Staffel Totenkopfverbnde—the Death’s Head Detachment of the SS. They are named after the most brutal unit of Hitler’s SS, the soldiers who ran the Nazi concentration camps in World War II. They call themselves the “Stormtroopers’.’

‘The Stormtroopers?’ Lauren said.

‘They are an elite paramilitary force of expatriate Germans, based in a heavily fortified Nazi retreat in Chile called Colonia Alemania. They were formed at the end of the Second World War by an ex-Auschwitz lieutenant named Odilo Ehrhardt.

‘According to Auschwitz survivors, Ehrhardt was a psychopath-an ox of a man who relished the sheer act of killing.

Apparently, Rudolph H6ss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, took a liking to him, and during the latter years of the war groomed him as his prot6g6. At twenty-two, Ehrhardt was elevated to the SS rank of Obersturmfiihrer, or lieutenant. After that, if H6ss pointed at you, a second later you would find yourself looking down the barrel of Ehrhardt’s P-38.’

Race swallowed.

Schroeder went on. ‘According to our records, Ehrhardt would now be seventy-five years of age. But within the Stormtrooper organisation, his word is law. He goes by the supreme SS rank of Oberstgruppenfidhrer, General.

‘The Stormtroopers are a singularly repulsive organisation,’

Schroeder said. ‘They advocate the forcible incarceration and execution of all Negroes and Jews, the destruction of democratic government worldwide and, most importantly, the restoration of a Nazi government to the unified Germany and the establishment of the Herrenvolk—the “master race”— as the ruling elite on earth.’

“The restoration of a Nazi government in Germany? The establishment of the master race as the ruling elite on earth?’

Copeland said in disbelief.

“Wait a second,’ Race said. ‘You’re talking about Nazis. In the nineties.”

‘Yes,’ Schroeder said. ‘Nazis. Modern-day Nazis.’

Frank Nash said, ‘Colonia Alemania has long been believed to be a safe haven for former Nazi officers. Eisler stayed there for a short time in the sixties. Eichmann, too.’

Schroeder nodded. ‘Colonia Alemania consists of pastures and lakes and Bavarian-style houses, all of which are surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers that are patrolled by armed guards and Doberman Pinschers twentyfour hours a day.

‘It was said that during the Pinochet regime, in exchange for protection from the government, Ehrhardt allowed Colonia Alemania to be used by the dictatorship as an unofficial torture centre. It was a place where people were sent to “disappear”. And with the protection of the military regime, Ehrhardt and his Nazi colony remained immune from search by foreign agencies like the BKA.’

‘All right, then,’ Nash said, ‘so how do they come into this equation?’

‘You see, Herr Nash, that is the problem,’ Schroeder said.

‘It is the Stormtroopers who have a Supernova.’

‘The Stormtroopers have a Supernova?’ Nash said flatly.

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus…’

‘Herr Nash, please. You must understand. In twenty years of counter-terrorist work, I have never encountered a group like the Stormtroopers.

It is well financed, well organised, strictly hierarchical, and totally and utterly ruthless.

‘It is made up of two types of person—soldiers and scientists. The Stormtroopers recruit mainly experienced soldiers, often men who have been dishonourably discharged from the former East German Army or the Bundeswehr for their predilections for using excessive force. Men like Heinrich Anistaze, men trained in the arts of terror, torture and assassination.’

‘Anistaze is a Stormtrooper?” Nash said. ‘I was under the impression he was working for German intellig—’

‘Not anymore,’ Schroeder said bitterly. ‘After the Eastern Bloc collapsed, Anistaze was hired by the German government on a contract basis only—to take care of certain “problems”. But it appears our leash wasn’t short enough.

‘Anistaze is a mercenary, a killer for hire. It wasn’t long before someone offered him more than we were paying him, and he betrayed two of his case officers and turned them over to the enemy.

‘It came as no surprise to us when, not long after that incident, his rather distinctive methods of persuasion started showing up in Stormtrooper-related incidents.

Apparently, Anistaze’s rise through the Stormtrooper ranks has been swift. We believe he is now an Obergruppenfiihrer in their ranking system. A lieutenant-general. Second only to Ehrhardt himself.’

‘Son of a bitch…’

‘As for scientists,’ Schroeder shrugged, ‘the same principles apply.

The Stormtroopers lure many highly educated men and women who are working on projects that are not seen as in keeping with modem Germany’s collective guilt.

‘For example, when the Wall came down, certain East German scientists developing NA grenades—grenades filled with nitric acid, designed to inflict horrific injuries but not to kill their victims—soon found themselves out of a job.

The Stormtroopers, on the other hand, are always on the lookout for those kinds of people, and they are willing to pay handsomely for their services.’

‘How?’ Copeland asked. ‘How can they afford all this?’

“Doctor Copeland. The modem Nazi movement has never been short of cash. In 1994, an illegal BKA trace of a suspected Nazi account in a Swiss bank estimated the Stormtroopers’ total cash reserves at more than half a billion dollars—the proceeds of the sale of priceless artifacts stolen during World War II.’

‘Half a billion dollars,’ Race breathed.

‘Gentlemen,’ Schroeder said, ‘the Stormtroopers, they do not hijack aeroplanes. They do not murder federal officials or blow up federal buildings. They look for greater victories-victories that will overthrow the entire world order.’

‘And now you think they have a Supernova?’ Nash said.

‘Up until about three days ago, all we had were unproveable suspicions,’ Schroeder said. ‘But now we are certain of it. Six months ago, BKA surveillance agents in Chile photographed a man strolling around the grounds of Colonia Alemania with Odilo Ehrhardt himself.

He was later identified as Doctor Fritz Weber. Herr Nash, I imagine that you would know who Doctor Weber is.’

‘Yes, but…’ Nash paused, frowning. ‘Fritz Weber was a German scientist during the Second World War, nuclear physicist, borderline genius, but also a borderline sociopath. He was one of the first people to state that the creation of a planet-destroying device was possible. In 1944, when he was only thirty, he worked on the Nazis’ atomic bomb project. But before that, it was said that Weber worked on the infamous Nazi torture experiments-they would put a man in freezing water and monitor how long it took for him to die. But I thought Weber was executed after the war…’

Schroeder nodded. ‘He was. Doctor Fritz Weber stood trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity in October 1945. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was officially executed on 22 November 1945 at Karlsburg prison. Whether it was actually Weber who was executed has been disputed for many years. There have been numerous sightings of him over the decades by people who claim to have been tortured by him—in Ireland, in Brazil, in Russia.’

Schroeder said seriously, ‘We believe that the Soviets spirited Weber out of Karlsburg the night before he was to be executed and replaced him with an impostor. In return for saving his life, the Soviets used Weber’s considerable skills to advance their own nuclear weapons program. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the BKA went looking for Weber, there was no sign of him at all. He had disappeared off the face of the earth.’

‘Only to turn up eight years later at the headquarters of a Nazi terrorist organisation,’ Nash added.

‘Correct. So at that stage, we were thinking that the Nazis were constructing a conventional nuclear device. But the Stormtroopers raid that monastery in France after it was discovered to possess the legendary Santiago Manuscript,’

Schroeder said. ‘When one pieced together the murder of Albert Mueller and his discovery of a meteorite crater in Peru and the supposed tale in the Santiago Manuscript of an idol with rather strange properties, suddenly our suspicions took on a whole new reality.

Maybe, under Weber’s tutelage, the Stormtroopers were doing more than just building a regular nuclear bomb, maybe they had succeeded in creating a Supernova and were now on the hunt for thyrium.

‘And then, three days ago the same day as the raid on the French monastery-our surveillance team in Chile picked up this.’

Schroeder pulled out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to Nash.

‘It’s a transcript of a telephone conversation that was made from a cellular phone somewhere in Peru to the main laboratory at Colonia Alemania three days ago,’ Schroeder said.

Nash showed the German transcript to Race, who translated it aloud.

VOICE 1: —-base of operations has been established—-rest of the—-will be—-mne—-

VOICE 2: —-about the device?—-ready?

VOICE 1: —-have adopted hourglass formation based on the American model—-two thermonuclear detonators mounted above and below a titanium-alloy inner chamber. Field tests indicate that—-device—-operational.

All we need now—-the thyrium,

VOICE 2: —-don’t worry, Anistaze’s taking care of that—

VOICE 1: What about the message?

VOICE 2: —-will go out as soon as we get the idol—-to every Prime Minister and President in the EU-plus the President of the United States via internal emergency hotline-o-ransom will be one hundred billion dollars U.S.—or else we detonate the device…

Nash stared at the transcript in shock.

Everyone else was silent.

Race gazed at the words: one hundred billion dollars U.S., or else we detonate the device.

Jesus H. Christ.

Nash turned to Schroeder. ‘So what have you done about all this?’

‘We have executed a two-pronged plan,’ the German said. “Two separate missions, each designed to reinforce the other should either of them fail.

‘Mission One was to get the thyrium idol before the Nazis did. To do that, we obtained a copy of the Santiago Manuscript and used it to find our way here. And as it happened, we beat the Stormtroopers—but we never expected to find those things inside the temple.’

As he listened to Schroeder speak, something twigged in the back of Race’s mind, something about what the German agent had just said. Something that wasn’t quite right.

He shook it off, put it to the back of his mind.

‘And the second part of the mission?’ Nash said.

‘Take out Colonia Alemania,’ Schroeder said. ‘After we intercepted that telephone conversation three days ago, we opened entreaties with the new Chilean government for a warrant that would allow BKA agents to search Colonia

Alemania in coordination with Chilean authorities.’

‘And?’

‘We got it. If everything has gone according to plan, BKA agents and the Chilean National Guard are right this minute storming the grounds of Colonia Alemania and seizing the Stormtroopers’ Supernova. I’m hoping to receive a radio update from them any minute now.’

At that very same moment six hundred miles away, a ten-ton truck owned by the Chilean National Guard exploded through the gates of Colonia Alemania.

A stream of olive-skinned Chilean soldiers rushed through the gates behind the rampaging truck. A dozen German agents dressed in blue assault helmets and SWAT gear hurried into the compound after them.

Colonia Alemania was a large estate, easily twenty hectares in size.

Its grassy green pastures contrasted sharply with Chile’s barren brown hills. Its Bavarian-style cottages and idyllic blue lakes were an oddly peaceful sight in what was an otherwise harsh and dry land.

Doors were smashed open and windows exploded .inwards as the National Guardsmen entered every building in the estate. Their main target was the Barracks Hall—a large, hangar-like building in the centre of the compound.

Minutes later, the doors to the Barracks Hall were blasted open and a horde of National Guardsmen and BKA agents rushed into the building.

And then they stopped.

Row upon row of empty bunk beds stretched away from them for the length of the enormous hall. Each bed was crisply made and perfectly aligned with the bunk next to it.

It looked like an army barracks.

The only problem was, it was empty.

Reports came in quickly from the rest of the compound.

The whole compound was empty.

Colonia Alemania was completely deserted.

In one of the laboratory buildings adjoining the Barracks Hall, two German tech agents waved small Geiger counter wands in front of them, measuring the radioactivity in the air. Their small detection units clattered loudly.

The two agents entered the compound’s main laboratory and their Geiger counters instantly went into the red.

‘All units, this is Lab Team, we are detecting high trace quantities of uranium and plutonium in the primary laboratory.’

The first agent came to a door that opened onto a glasswalled office of some kind.

He pointed his wand at the closed door—

—and his Geiger counter went off the charts.

He exchanged a quick look with his partner. Then he pushed open the door, tripping the wire.

The explosion that ripped through Colonia Alemania was absolutely devastating.

It rocked the world.

A pulse of blinding white light shot out laterally in every direction, obliterating everything in its path—whole barns blew out instantly into a billion matchsticks, concrete silos were shattered in a millisecond, everything within a five-hundred-yard radius of the Barracks Hall was vaporised—including the one hundred and fifty Chilean National Guardsmen and the twelve BKA agents.

When they were interviewed about it in the days to come, the inhabitants of the surrounding villages would say that it had looked like a sudden flare of lightning on the horizon, followed by an enormous plume of black smoke that rose high into the sky in the shape of a gigantic mushroom.

But they were simple folk, peasants.

They didn’t know that they were describing a thermonuclear explosion.

Back in Vilcafor, Nash ordered the Green Berets to bring the German team’s radio satellite equipment out onto the main street.

‘Let’s see what your people in Chile have got to say’ he said to Schroeder.

Schroeder popped the lid on the portable radio console and began typing something quickly on its all-weather key board. Nash, Scott and the Green Berets crowded around him, watching the console’s screen intently.

Race stood outside the circle, excluded yet again.

‘How are you feeling?’ a woman’s voice said suddenly from behind him.

He turned, half-expecting to see Lauren, but instead found himself looking into the dazzling blue eyes of the German woman.

She was small, petite—and seriously cute. She stood with her hands resting lazily on her hips and a smile that disarmed Race completely.

She had a small button nose and short blonde hair, and liberal doses of mud splotched all over her face, T-shirt and jeans. She wore a bulletproof vest over her white T-shirt and a black Gore-Tex holster on her hip—identical to the one Schroeder wore. Like Schroeder’s, her holster was now empty.

‘How is your head feeling?’ she asked. She had a slight German accent. Race liked it.

‘It hurts,’ he said.

‘It should,’ she said, coming over and touching his brow.

‘I think you suffered a minor concussion when your Humvee crashed into that helicopter. All of your subsequent acts of derring-do on top of the chopper must have been the work of pure adrenalin.’

‘You mean I’m not a hero?’ Race said. ‘You’re saying it was just the adrenalin talking?’

She smiled at him, a beautiful smile. ‘Wait here,’ she said, ‘I have some codeine in my medicine pack. It’ll help your headache.’

She moved off toward the ATV.

‘Hey…’ Race said. ‘What’s your name?’

She smiled at him again. That cute, nymph-like smile.

‘My name is Renee Becker. I am a special agent with the BKA.’

‘I’ve got it,’ Schroeder said suddenly from over by the portable radio.

Race went over to the small group gathered around the radio console.

Looking over Nash’s shoulder, he saw a list printed on the screen in German. He translated it in his head. It read:

COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE TRANSMISSION LOG 44-76/BKA32

NO.