Dry Ice (33 page)

Teke’s look was grim. “It’s a thousand miles inland, so subs and ships are out. The hundred-mile-per-hour winds and sudden white-outs rule out small planes and choppers. It’s too damned cold for them, anyway. And it’s too far to make it with tracked vehicles unless we fly them in with us.”

“What’s left?”

“A human air drop.”

“Sounds good.”

“I don’t recommend it.” Teke let out a hard breath. “Candy, what you’re asking for is complicated and dangerous. We don’t have the right sort of people on that side of the planet, and we can’t get them there from here quickly enough.”

“I have friends who can handle that little wrinkle.”

He paused and looked at her deeply. “Do you outrank me?”

Candy smiled at him. “I’m not sure. Would you like me to find out?”

“Not really.” Teke let out a resigned breath. “I’ll make some calls.”

“I already asked the Agency and the ONR to see if there’s someone local who might be able to help. Some of those people Greg took with him when he left HAARP might be loose assets. Who are you thinking of calling?” she asked sweetly.

“My A-team,” he replied drily, giving her a look.

“Oh, mercy, Teke, you don’t mean Curly and Moe, do you?” she said with an edge to her voice that was accompanied by a roll of her eyes.

“Admirals Rowan and Hormann are excellent tacticians, dedicated, highly decorated officers, and creative thinkers.”

“They’re also your buddies from college—”

“It was the War College, Candy,” he ground out.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve heard the stories. Something about a silver mylar balloon carrying thrusters and a circuit board. Got you all in trouble with the Park Police, I heard. Didn’t it land on the South Lawn of the White House at midnight?”

“The steps of the Capitol at five
A.M
.,” he corrected.

“A distinction without a difference. What can those two clowns bring to the table?”

“They’re hardly clowns. Rowan spent fifteen years running or commanding subs and just got a third star on his collar. Hormann turned down a chance to teach at TOPGUN so he could stay in D.C. It’s a tribute to both of them that they’ve managed to retain a sense of humor after this long.”

“Bless their hearts,” she said too sweetly, then paused and became serious. “I really need a plan, Teke. One that will blow the garter belt off our commander in chief. Just in case she asks.”

Teke stared at her for a moment, then nodded and looked out the window. The rest of the trip was spent in silence.

*   *   *

“Nik. A moment?” Ron said over his shoulder as he walked past him into the conference room.

Nik, who was sitting at a spare workstation in the sandbox, looked up from his computer, which was just booting up. “Tess isn’t here yet and I haven’t had my first cup of coffee. Can it wait?”

“I wouldn’t advise it.”

Nik followed him, shut the door, then leaned against it. And waited.

Ron turned to face him with an expression that was uncharacteristically concerned. “Something’s going down, Nik. It’s not good. Worse than what has already happened.”

Nik pushed away from the door as the day’s first adrenaline burst hit his bloodstream. “What’s up?”

“I couldn’t sleep much last night. I kept thinking about what Tess said about Greg possibly doing this for reasons of revenge or just insanity. So I started looking a little closer at some of the code in his algorithms for the Extremely High Frequency array. It’s the latest one to flip into pre-warm-up mode. Take a look.”

Taking the few short steps to the table, Nik peered at the screen of the laptop Ron had brought in with him. On it was the interface for the command queue for the EHF array. It overlapped windows showing the command queues for the other arrays.

The code was full of strings that Nik had never seen before. He glanced up at Ron. “What is this?”

Ron shook his head after replying with a shrug. “I’m not sure. It looks like he’s done some sort of crude crypto on it. Swapped out meanings or—” He lifted his shoulders in another shrug.

“Is this the first time you’ve seen it?”

“Pretty much. Until yesterday, I didn’t usually check Greg’s work,” he replied drily, causing Nik to bite back a grin. “The problem is, none of this makes sense. The coordinates are still bogus, but they’re set to a different scale than the other events were, the ones that have already happened.”

“How so?”

“A lot of these coordinates are in the oceans. Open ocean, miles away from anywhere. What’s the point of that?”

“Beats me,” Nik muttered, remembering what Tess had said many hours ago about war games being interrupted. “Do we still have access to the system?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘access.’ Everyone can log in, but nothing happens. Everything I’ve tried to put in for the last twelve hours has been rejected. Doesn’t matter what it is. And the coordinate system, the timing system—they’re all wrong. Nothing means what it should.”

“I thought you cracked that yesterday.”

“We did. It changed again.” He met Nik’s eyes. “That doesn’t happen by accident.”

“Have you tried inputting anything new? Just as a test?”

“Yes.”

“Did it take?”

“No. But I don’t like the way these coordinates keep changing. He’s brain-fucking us.”

“Well, we might be screwed anyway,” Nik said as he straightened up. “Tess wants to power down the arrays.”

Ron’s eyes widened. “That’s a bit extreme.”

“That’s what I said. If we don’t want to do that, we have to come up with Plan B.”

“We don’t have a Plan A yet.”

“Put it on your list,” Nik said as he turned to leave the room. “I’ve got to get Tess in here.”

CHAPTER
27

For the last ten days, the weather in the belly of the Mediterranean had been unusually torpid for mid-April. Tourists from Britain and Germany and places farther north were delighted to spend the hot, dry, still days roasting themselves on the beaches of Ibiza and Sardinia, and pass long, late, wine-filled evenings on flower-bedecked balconies from Marbella to Barcelona. Farther along the region’s other coastlines—Nice, the high instep of Italy’s boot, the beaches of Tunisia to the cliffs of Tripoli, even up the Dalmatian coast—the weather was close to perfect. Everyone was happy.

Yachtsmen at the helms of sleek, tall-masted, wood-hulled beauties were the first to notice the change. After drifting easily near the slim, imposing Strait of Gibraltar for more than a week, unwilling to venture into an oddly becalmed Atlantic, they welcomed the freshening breezes. They cut their idling engines, ran up the sails, and enjoyed the ancient, still romantic rush of seeing broad sheets of canvas fill with salt air and billow into round, sensual fullness.

Glad as they were for the sea change, it didn’t take long for those same mariners to sense that Nature was behaving with more than simple vernal capriciousness. Their barometers, both the electronically fed and the timeworn devices reliant on mercury, were unsettled. All across the region, something was amiss, and the wisest among the sailors aimed their bowsprits toward the nearest port of call. Those less wizened or just less wise accepted the challenge blowing their way, never considering they might live to regret it—or not live at all.

The wind stiffened overnight and the temperature dropped. Barometers began to fall. And fall.

Tourists awakened to heavy skies similar to the ones they’d left behind in Copenhagen, Basingstoke, and Bonn; and to winds that bit through their optimistically lightweight holiday clothing. By noon, lightning rent the sky. Cold rain pelted sideways from dense black clouds that seemed close enough to touch. Visitors huddled, grumbling, in the cramped living rooms of their vacation rentals or the pubs of their hotels. Shops pulled in their awnings. Cafés closed.

By midnight, the salty waters of the Mediterranean were battering seawalls and assaulting beaches with waves that topped ten feet. Scores of uprooted palms lay across streets and cars; centuries-old olive and cedar trees stood at awkward angles against the onslaught, already stripped of both their equilibrium and their most majestic limbs. Cell towers and bell towers toppled; streets flooded. Beleaguered mayors of wounded coastal cities and near-dead villages hovered over battery-powered laptops, tapping out emotional pleas for government aid and for tourists not to desert them in this time of need.

Television meteorologists across the region were bemused by the spring storm’s existence as well as its growth and intensity; none of them had predicted this early Mediterranean hurricane—or Medicane, as the more hip of the fraternity called it. Yet even as they discussed its strange provenance, the unnamed storm grew like a sea monster from a myth.

As it widened its reach, the hurricane’s forward speed increased dramatically. In defiance of the odds and the laws of Nature, its convection tower expanded vertically and horizontally, battering both the Tunisian coastline and the ankle of Italy’s boot as it churned a broad, vicious path across Sicily and left a decimated Malta in its wake. Once in the open basin that stretched from Libya to Greece, its path momentarily unobstructed by either islands or continental promontories, the storm gained even more strength.

It skirted Crete and then, roaring like a beast mortally wounded and seeking revenge, it lunged toward the region’s most tense coastlines.

Beirut, Damascus, Tel Aviv, Gaza—all were crushed by the fierce, awesome power of winds topping 110 knots and laden with rain that pelted both ancient walls and modern edifices like the lethal, scattering spray from an Uzi. Flint’s hundreds of acres of orchards, which stretched along the coastal plane of the Middle East, were flattened; millions of dollars of fruit were pulped into the earth. Farther down the coast, the company’s newest endeavor—a hard-won, much-lauded, state-of-the-art desalination plant intended to bring freshwater to a thirsty region—was ravaged by the storm, its solar-power plant destroyed beyond repair.

The area’s famously restive populations, though accustomed to the random violence of humanity, were unprepared for the indiscriminate brutality of the storm. The people had no option but to retreat until the winds stopped keening and the rain wore itself out. When the sunshine returned, a sodden, broken world lay before them and the grim task of recovering got under way.

As soon as secure communications were restored, the U.S. secretary of defense, shaken but safe in the embassy’s heavily reinforced underground shelter, called Candy Freeman, demanding to know what actions were being taken to stop Greg Simpson before he could strike again.

*   *   *

It was still dark outside—dark and cold—at 6:30
A.M.
in Washington, D.C. Gianni fought the urge to stamp his feet to keep the circulation going as the armed military police officer ran his driver’s license through a scanner, then frowned at the screen and tapped a few keys. Gianni’s arms were folded tightly against his chest to ward off the wet chill as he stood at the entry gate to Bolling Air Force Base. He was there to meet with Candy Freeman, who’d sent a team of FBI agents to wake him up a few hours earlier.

The agents had been polite. They’d offered to let him call his attorney, but Gianni had seen his attorney’s Old Greenwich home—or, rather, the wreckage left in the place where the house had stood just a few days ago—in some Internet footage and had opted not to call. So he’d been gently placed in the back of a Bronco next to a third agent for the trip to the airport in White Plains. Getting there had been an adventure. The roads were nearly impassable. The power was still out and the only light came from the Bronco’s headlights, the moon, and the harsh flash of battery-powered traffic barriers. It was just as well. Gianni didn’t really want to see what had happened to the formerly picturesque Merritt Parkway.

The airport was dark and silent. Silhouettes of wrecked planes dotted the landscape. The SUV pulled up to a small jet parked on the tarmac and Gianni was ushered onto it. The plushness of the little jet surprised him. One of the FBI agents onboard noticed him staring and said, “It belonged to a South Florida drug dealer. We nailed him under RICO and got this as a bonus.”

“Ah, that explains the ambience,” Gianni replied pleasantly as he took his place in a seat that appeared to be upholstered in ostrich. The seat belt—dyed lizard—had a scratched, utilitarian chrome buckle, which seemed really out of place. Gianni looked back at the agent.

“They used to be gold-plated, with diamonds. They were sold off.”

Gianni smiled.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad flight. The coffee they offered him was probably Maxwell House instead of Starbucks, but it was hot and caffeinated and had woken him up. So here he was, a mere two hours after opening his front door, freezing his ass off in decidedly unscenic southeast D.C.

It’s amazing how efficient the government can be when it wants something.

At last the cop returned his license and waved Gianni and the FBI agents through the gate, where an escort waited in a nice, warm car.

Inside the main building, things went a little faster. Badges were issued and smart cards were swiped. Gianni and his entourage stepped through the metal detector and toward the elevator. The doors opened almost instantly.

Seconds later they stepped into a deeply carpeted hallway lined with potted plants and some seriously nice art. His escorts—both FBI and military—remained silent as they walked about halfway down the hall and stopped in front of a door identified by a brass plaque that bore no title, just a last name and an initial:
C. FREEMAN
.

Gianni entered the anteroom alone and was greeted by a smiling assistant who directed him to have a seat, then picked up the phone. He’d barely sat down when he was told that Ms. Freeman would see him now.

His first up-close look at Candy Freeman was not what he expected. Gianni knew her by reputation and had seen pictures and occasional news footage of her, so he knew what she looked like. But he hadn’t expected the wattage of her smile to be so high, nor the energy level in the room to be so apparent. Especially at this hour.